Adivinhe quem : traços da elipse em constituintes interrogados

Abstract

In this research we aimed to analyze which features are determining to identify and legitimate Sluicing in Portuguese namely, ellipsis of interrogative phrases or WhP Ellipsis. Interrogative phrases or wh-phrases are those always legitimated and headed by a interrogative pronoun or wh-pronoun and their ellipsis are featured by a remaining of a subordinate wh-phrase. Indeed, that phenomenon has hardly ever been studied in Portuguese, lacking a determination of which features are essentials to configure WhP ellipsis in our language. Therefore through compared syntax we looked for examples in English, which has already many studies about the subject as well as other languages as German, Greek, Hebrew, only to mention a few ones. Our result shows up that similar to English, Portuguese as well is a language that allows two essential features to identify and legitimate WhP ellipsis, [+wh], that legitimate the elided structure, and [+focus] that mostly brings up a new attribute to approaches which justify that WhP ellipsis is resulted by moving operations. As a final point, the study of a last feature, E-feature, uniform in every language which allows Slucing, reveals itself as a highly determinant feature of the emptiness left by ellipsis, once [+wh] and [+focus] are features that typify the remaining of wh-phrase after deletion and on the other hand E is a feature that typifies the elided structure.