Disguised Multiple Remnants in the Right Dislocation Construction and Fragments

Abstract

Under the ellipsis approach, the gapless Right Dislocation Construction (RDC) involves leftward movement of the appendix (RDed element), followed by clausal ellipsis (Tanaka 2001, Abe 2004, Chung 2009, Ott and de Vries 2015). Recently, however, Shimoyama, Drummond, Schwarz and Wagner (2015) have pointed out a non-trivial problem for the ellipsis approach. In particular, they claim that the ellipsis approach expects a wrong scope fact in Japanese. In this paper, focusing on Korean data, I first show that the same problem arises for binding phenomena. However, I argue that the problems are only apparent and can readily be resolved under the ellipsis approach. It is argued that in these contexts the singleton appendix disguises multiple appendices, one of which is a null appendix. It is also observed that the gapped RDC and fragments exhibit the same pattern as the gapless RDC, and the paper explores the possibility of extending the proposed analysis to these constructions. As a consequence, it is shown that the parallel pattern among these constructions can be taken in favor of the ellipsis approach to the gapless RDC and gapped RDC.