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This paper shows in some detail that the hypothesis briefly discussed in Busquets and Denis (Cahiers de grammaire 26: 55–74, 2001) that French displays both PF-deletion and pro-form ellipsis of sentential complements with different classes of verbs is indeed correct. It subsequently focuses on the PF-deletion type (i.e., modal ellipsis) and argues that like English VP ellipsis, this type of ellipsis should be syntactically derived by way of movement and that French elided TPs stand in a topic position. The syntactic chain thus created by Move is composed of two links: the first merge copy, which is always silent, as is the case with most types of movement, and the remerge copy, which also remains silent, being recoverable from the discourse, but sometimes allows phrasal subparts to undergo further A′-movement to Spec, FocP, a position where they are fully spelled-out at PF. The absence of intervention as well as freezing effects associated with the latter movement are then explained using the rescue by PF deletion account developed in Boškovic (Linguistic Inquiry 42: 1–44, 2011). This novel theory of French modal ellipsis is shown to correctly predict the existence of what Busquets and Denis (Cahiers de grammaire 26: 55–74, 2001:13) named French Pseudo-Gapping, as well as the much more restricted distribution of modal ellipsis in untensed contexts. It also provides a partial answer to why French does not have VP ellipsis and why English does not have modal ellipsis.

This paper characterizes Contrastive Focus Fronting (CFF) in European Portuguese, distinguishing it from Topicalization and Evaluative exclamatives on the basis of syntactic and interpretational tests illustrated with empirical evidence from intuition/introspective judgments and different types of written sources. It reveals that the lack of consensus among speakers regarding CFF is a consequence of the fact that Contemporary European Portuguese includes two grammars with CFF. One grammar is less restrictive regarding the array of constituents that can be fronted. The other grammar only allows fronting of deictics or constituents containing them. In this more restrictive variant, CFF structures are comparable to other grammatical structures of European Portuguese, which have in common the fact that word order alternations may be limited to deictic elements. Finally, this study identifies the relevant semantic features to tease apart CFF, Topicalization and Evaluative exclamatives. CFF involves fronting of constituents with the features [D-linked]/[deictic] and [evaluative]. Topicalization structures and Evaluative exclamatives do not associate the two types of features: topicalized constituents are [D-linked]; the fronted constituent in Evaluative exclamatives bears the feature [evaluative].

This paper examines the topic of retention in structural and semantic change. While much of the literature on grammaticalization has focused on uncovering the remnants of semantic nuances of lexical items contained in autonomous structures, recent proposals have argued for a parallel effect related to structural conditions. To address this issue, I survey the distribution of hacer ‘to do/make’; + time constructions in Spanish used with either a punctual or durative meaning. Using a quantitative analysis of corpus data from spoken Spanish, I argue that hacer + time exhibits both (i) a general leveling across the constructional paradigm resulting in structural and semantic neutralization and (ii) retention of clausal features associated with the source construction, particularly with low-frequency collocates (e.g., hacía). The result of this process of grammaticalization is a type of syntactic ‘blend’ that expresses features both of a verb and an adjunctival element. The nature of this particular instance of structural and semantic change is argued to be distinct from cases discussed previously in the literature in that the hacer + time construction does not exhibit the same degree of structural autonomy.