Ellipsis in short answers to polar questions

This paper investigates ellipsis in short answers to polar questions (PQs), with a focus on the interpretive challenges posed by negative polar questions (NPQs). While short yes/no answers to positive questions are typically unambiguous, responses to NPQs often display semantic ambiguity or unacceptability. Building on and critiquing existing ellipsis-based accounts (Holmberg, 2013, 2016; Kramer & Rawlins, 2010; Merchant, 2004), this study argues that these interpretive issues arise not from negative concord or selective interpretability, but from structural ambiguity in the placement of negation and competition in polarity feature valuation. The analysis distinguishes between high, low, and structurally ambiguous (“middle”) negation in NPQs and demonstrates that ellipsis interacts differently with each. Drawing on data from English NPQs, the paper proposes a unified model of polarity valuation that explains when short answers are interpretable. This account offers a cross-linguistically consistent and theoretically principled refinement of ellipsis phenomena in polar question-answer pairs.