Null objects are ellipsis in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

AbstractBrazilian Portuguese (BP) is known to license anaphoric null objects (ANO), that is, null objects with a linguistic antecedent. It also licenses VP ellipsis (VPE), with auxiliaries, modals and main verbs, the latter a case of V-stranding VPE (V-VPE), the one with which we will be concerned. Although ANOs and V-VPE may have identical surface strings in BP, we propose that they do not have the same structure. We argue that ANOs in BP are cases of DP ellipsis, and they present four properties that have been associated with (VP) ellipsis in the literature: a) availability of strict/sloppy readings (Ross, 1967.