Argument Ellipsis and Scope Economy in Japanese

In this article, I show that in Japanese, while some focus elements obligatorily take wide scope with respect to scope-bearing predicative heads, argument ellipsis reverses this scope possibility, so that narrow-scope interpretation of the focus element is obligatory. I further show that Scope Parallelism (Fox 2000) overrides this narrow-scope requirement for elided arguments; when the antecedent clause exhibits scope interaction, the elided clause shows the parallel wide-scope option. I argue that such scope possibilities fall out from the interaction of the derivational-PF-deletion analysis of ellipsis (Takahashi 2013, 2017), the Morphological Merger of predicative heads (Shibata 2015), and Scope Economy and Parallelism (Fox 2000).