37.295, Diss: Hindi, Urdu; Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax: Fauzia Mughal: "Background Deletion: The Syntax of Clausal Ellipsis in Hindi/Urdu"

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-295. Wed Jan 21 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.295, Diss: Hindi, Urdu; Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax: Fauzia Mughal: "Background Deletion: The Syntax of Clausal Ellipsis in Hindi/Urdu"

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Date: 21-Jan-2026
From: Fauzia Mughal [fmugh068 at uottawa.ca]
Subject: Background Deletion: The Syntax of Clausal Ellipsis in Hindi/Urdu


Institution: University of Ottawa
Degree Date: 2026

Dissertation Title: Background Deletion: The Syntax of Clausal
Ellipsis in Hindi/Urdu

Dissertation URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/51242

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics
                     Semantics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): Hindi (hin)
                     Urdu (urd)

Dissertation Director(s): Dennis Ott

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation explores the syntax of subsententials in Hindi/Urdu
(H/U), with an empirical focus on sluicing and fragment answers. Such
phenomena represent instances where all clausal material is
unpronounced, except for a (wh-)phrase (e.g., A: Who did John see? B:
Mary.). With evidence from various connectivity effects, I argue that
a non-structuralist analysis of such configurations, which does not
assume the presence of tacit material, is untenable. Rather,
subsententials in this language warrant a structuralist solution,
according to which the surfacing remnant base-generates in an
underlying clause whose morpho-syntax is reduced at PF. Most
structuralist proposals of clausal ellipsis, including scant proposals
of sluicing in H/U, assume PF-deletion targets a syntactic constituent
(TP), forcing the remnant to escape the ellipsis site it is born in
(e.g., A: Who did John see? B: Mary (John saw t)., where material in
parentheses is PF-deleted). I argue against this conventional view,
given the conceptual and empirical issues it raises, chiefly,
exceptional movement. I alternatively suggest that non-pronunciation
freely and maximally affects morpho-syntactic material surrounding the
remnant, allowing it to remain in situ (e.g., A: Who did John see? B:
(John saw) Mary.), as has been argued elsewhere for other languages
(Kimura 2010, 2013; Bruening 2015; Abe 2015; Ott and Struckmeier 2018;
Sato et al. 2018; Griffiths 2019; a.o.). Although PF-deletion is not
sensitive to syntactic constituency from this perspective,
morpho-syntactic material that does PF-delete must constitute the
propositional background of the elided clause to ensure recoverability
of unspoken content, reducing clausal ellipsis in H/U to background
deletion, a solution that is far more parsimonious and generalizable
than competing ‘move-and-delete’ accounts. I then propose to extend
this analysis to correlativization in H/U, wherein a left-peripheral
relative clause is associated with a correlate in the host clause (HC)
(e.g., The girl who is standing, she is tall). Correlatives (CRs) in
this language bear discordant characteristics: on the one hand, CRs
display properties that point to their connectivity with the HC (e.g.,
reconstruction effects) and, on the other, features that point to
their extra-sentential status (e.g., the lack of a gap in the HC and
prosodic separation of CR–HC). Following recent work on
Romance/Germanic left-dislocation (Ott 2014, 2015), which presents a
similar paradox, I propose that CRs are not syntactically dependent on
their HC; conversely, they are relatives that are part of a separate
root clause which is juxtaposed in discourse with the HC and is
reduced at PF under identity with it (e.g., The girl who is standing
(is tall). She is tall.). Connectivity effects of CRs are argued to be
ellipsis-mediated, given that such effects are likewise observed in
sluicing and fragment answers. In reconciling the contradictory
properties of CRs, this novel proposal has an explanatory edge over
existing accounts that assume syntactic integration of CR–HC and that
rely on either movement or base-generation.



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