Silent Resumption: A New Test for Ellipsis

While extraction out of silent anaphors is deservedly considered one of the strongest tests for the existence of silent structure in the anaphoric site (ellipsis), in many environments considered to be elliptical it is not applicable, either because the ellipsis site is an inherent barrier or because it is rendered inaccessible to syntactic operations by virtue of ellipsis itself. I propose that this obstacle can be bypassed by testing whether the anaphoric site may host an internal resumptive pronoun. In a number of Ā-dependencies, the operator requires the presence of such a pronoun due to the Ban on Vacuous Quantification. This requirement holds purely at LF and is indifferent to island constraints; hence, it fills the diagnostic lacuna left by the limitations of the extraction test. I put this new test to use in Hebrew, where genuine ellipsis coexists alongside strategies of deep anaphora like empty n heads and null complement anaphora. The results of the silent resumption test confirm the availability of nP-, DP-, and PP-ellipsis in the language—all categories resisting extraction out of them. I discuss further implications that bear on the analysis of “mixed anaphors” in a number of other languages.