Polish Modal Ellipsis

Abstract

Over the past years, Modal Ellipsis (ME) has been the focus of some cross-linguistic investigations in languages such as Spanish (Dagnac 2010, Fernández-Sánchez 2023), Dutch (Aelbrecht 2010), French (Authier 2011), and Czech (Gruet-Skrabalova 2017), among others. Initially, it was considered to involve a null proform – a silent pronominal element standing in for the missing complement (Brucart 1999, Depiante 2000). More recent analyses, however, argue that this elliptical construction should be analysed as PF-deletion. According to this approach, the ellipsis site has a full syntactic structure deleted at Phonetic Form. In this paper, I propose that Polish ME follows the PF-deletion pattern, specifically targeting the complement of VoiceP. To test this hypothesis, I examine three diagnostics – extraction, case connectivity effects, and syntactic mismatches. The data reveal that Polish ME allows extraction and exhibits case-matching effects between the remnant and the elided structure. These findings provide compelling evidence that Polish ME involves an underlying syntactic structure deleted at PF.