Elided material is present in prosodic structure

Because elided material is silent, we might not expect it to have direct representation in the prosodic structure. I argue with experimental evidence that the presence or absence of elided structure does have an effect on the prosodic realization. This result suggests that elided material must be present in narrow syntax in order to be mapped onto prosodic structure (e.g. Johnson 2001; Merchant 2001, 2004; van Craenenbroeck 2010). It challenges alternative theories which claim that elided material is not fully present in syntax by assuming that elided material is copied at LF (Chung et al. 1995), is partially present in syntax as a pronoun (e.g. Landau 2021), or has an enriched meaning by a discourse rule (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984; Ginzburg & Sag 2000; Jacobson 2016). Furthermore, this result supports a derivational view of the syntax-prosody mapping with a particular ordering of operations. For example, if ellipsis involves PF-deletion, then elided material has not yet been deleted at the point of prosodification. This experiment also demonstrates the value of experimental methods in understanding theories of ellipsis. Theories make concrete testable predictions about prosody, which are borne out by subtle effects in prosodic boundaries. These boundary effects are so subtle that they may not be detectable impressionistically, but only by phonetic measures such as durations.