Adjectives and deleted nominals in Spanish
Luis Eguren · Romance languages and linguistic theory · 2009
In this paper I argue against previous strictly formal accounts of adjectival modification in nominal expressions with ellipsis in Spanish, which make use of structural conditions, such as different syntactic positions for adjectives, X-bar constraints on the target of ellipsis and/or minimality effects within the DP, and propose instead that the restricted distribution of adjectives in Spanish elliptical DPs can be reduced to a contrastive focus condition on nominal ellipsis, whereby only adjectives that create Roothian sets of alternatives, giving rise to a partitive set-subset relation, can combine with an elided noun.