Insights from Turkish Noun Phrases for Ellipsis Process

This article reviews the theoretical approaches to ellipsis, specifically focusing on elided noun phrases in Turkish. We first distinguish ellipsis from similar linguistic phenomena, such as gapping and stripping, to clarify its unique characteristics. Following these particular features, we investigate both non-structural and structural approaches to ellipsis, examining their implications and limitations in the context of Turkish NPs. While the non-structural approach and the null-form approach with the structural perspective focus primarily on how ellipsis operates within grammatical forms, we find that they are inadequate to explain certain mismatches or to determine the syntactic restrictions of noun phrase ellipsis in Turkish. In contrast, the phonological-form deletion approach offers a more comprehensive explanation by emphasizing the phrasal heads, providing a syntactic and derivational account of ellipsis, but there are still some patterns in Turkish NPs that require further explanation within the phonological-form deletion framework.