Ellipsis and AGREE: Parallelism Effects in Spanish Noun Drop

Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, The University of Western Ontario

Abstract

In Spanish it is possible to drop nouns in order to avoid repetition. Noun drop is very productive (Ticio 2001; 2005).

Given the high level of accuracy in gender concord found in previous studies (Bruhn de Garavito and White 2002; White et al 2004, among others) I predict that adult learners of Spanish have the appropriate representation of number and gender in their L2. They will therefore distinguish between these two features under ellipsis.