AGREEment and ellipsis

Abstract The interest in such diverse topics such as agreement and ellipsis, and their interaction with several components of the language system (syntax, pragmatics, phonology…) has increased in the last decades, as new approaches emerge to enable more precise analyses of the mechanisms underlying agreement relations and elliptical constructions. This special issue gathers a selection of six papers from the 32nd Colloquium on Generative Grammar and from the Workshop on Case, Agreement and Ellipsis immediately following the 32CGG (University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, April 2023) which focus on two main topics: (i) agreement and related notions, such as feature specification (or underspecification) on heads, the nature of φ-feature valuation and the agreement mechanism itself, or a case of predicate ellipsis where a clitic appears to participate in agreement licensing; and (ii) prima facie elliptical phenomena, such as Righ-Node Raising (analysed through the lenses of discourse), an LF-copying approach to ellipsis, where ellipsis in the main clause is licensed by an adverbial clause, and a syntactic approach to symmetric predicates under VP-ellipsis. This introductory paper serves as a state of the art as well as guide for the readers of this special collection and offers an overview of the topics dealt with in each contribution.