Japanese/Korean Linguistics

This article presents new evidence that particle-stranding ellipsis in Japanese is best explained by PF-deletion rather than LF-copying. I first examine whether overt extraction out of an ellipsis site is possible, and conclude that such extraction is indeed possible, contrary to the prediction made by the LF-copying analysis. Our novel finding comes from hitherto unobserved prosodic evidence that particle-stranding ellipsis involving the negative polarity item -sika can bear focus intonation. I argue that this prosody-based evidence is unexpected under the LF-copying theory, as this analysis recovers syntactic structure only covertly and does not account for the observed intonational pattern. If the present analysis is on the right track, it not only contributes to a better understanding of elliptical phenomena in Japanese, but also offers an important perspective on ellipsis–prosody interactions, an area that remains underexplored in the literature.