Negative stripping under sprouting in Spanish

Negative stripping refers to cases where a full clause coordinates with a lexical phrase (XP) which is modified by negation (John ate the apples but not the pears). In Spanish, negation (NEG) may follow or precede the XP. While the order XP-NEG uncontroversially involves clausal ellipsis (Depiante 2000), plenty of analyses have been proposed for NEG-XP. In this paper, I claim, based on previous research (cf. Fernández-Sánchez 2019) as well as on new data, that while these strings are better analyzed as what-you-see-is-what-you-get structures, not all NEG-XP sequences are amenable to such an analysis. In particular, I focus on NEG-XP strings under sprouting, i.e. cases where the XP has no correlate in the preceding clause (John ate, but not the apples). For these cases, I defend that they must involve clausal ellipsis coupled with rightward movement of the remnant XP within the to-be-deleted clause. The implication is that, contrary to what is often assumed, the internal make-up of stripping in Spanish cannot be determined a priori based on the word order of NEG and XP, at least not completely: the generalization is that XP-NEG always corresponds to a structure involving clausal ellipsis, while NEG-XP sequences are not always cases of constituent coordination.