MaxElide Effects in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

In this article, we point out that what Hartman (2011) observes about how elided sentences with adjunct wh-phrases behave in English is not fully repeated in Mandarin Chinese, and aim to account for the difference between the two languages in terms of the different base positions of relevant adjuncts coupled with Hartman’s (2011) formulation of MaxElide, a condition requiring ellipsis to apply to the largest possible domain. In doing so, we provide a supportive argument for Takahashi and Fox’s (2005) and Hartman’s (2011) reformulation over Merchant’s (2008) original definition of the condition.