Graduation Semester and Year
Spring 2026
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Joseph Sabbagh
Abstract
A recent and increasingly influential line of work, developed across a series of papers by Landau (2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2023a, 2025), argues that Verb-Stranding VP- Ellipsis (VSVPE) does not exist as a distinct grammatical process and that apparent verb-stranding patterns in the world’s languages reduce to Argument Ellipsis (AE), with the internal argument alone falling inside the deletion domain. This dissertation responds to that program with new evidence from Standard Arabic (SA).
Two questions are addressed. First, whether SA object gaps involve null pronominal anaphora or deletion of syntactic structure. Binding, scope, and identity diagnostics show that they involve structural deletion, aligning SA with cross-linguistic findings from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, Hebrew, and Portuguese. Second, whether the deletion domain is the entire VP or the internal argument alone. Two independent probes are applied. The adjunct recoverability probe shows that VP- internal modifiers are recovered together with the object and that the pattern tracks deletion size rather than the polarity-based licensing proposed by Landau (2023a). The semantic type probe tests whether object gaps support readings requiring a generalized quantifier of type ⟨⟨𝑒, 𝑡⟩, 𝑡⟩ inside the ellipsis site, against Landau’s (2025) claim that AE restricts elided arguments to type ⟨𝑒⟩. Universal quantifiers under negation, inverse scope, downward-entailing quantifiers, numeral indefinites, and illā exceptives all preserve quantificational readings incompatible with a type-⟨𝑒⟩ gap.
The two probes converge on VP-sized deletion. The SA evidence disconfirms Landau’s central claim that VSVPE can be eliminated from the typology and supports a grammar in which VSVPE and AE coexist as distinct options.
Keywords
Object gaps, Ellipsis, Standard Arabic, VSVPE, Verb Stranding VPE, AE, Argument ellipsis
Disciplines
Arabic Language and Literature | Arabic Studies
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Aloufi, Yousif, "Objectless Sentences in Standard Arabic" (2026). Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations. 1.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/linguistics_tesol_dissertations2/1