Ellipsis (in Romance languages) José M. BRUCART (CLT-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) josepmaria.brucart@uab.cat Javier FERNÁNDEZ-SÁNCHEZ (Uniwersytet Gdański) j.fernandez-sanchez@ug.edu.pl Ángel J. GALLEGO (CLT-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) angel.gallego@uab.cat 1. Introduction: Approaches to Ellipsis A pervasive goal of linguistic theory concerns the complex and manifold sound- meaning interactions of natural languages. Perhaps the hallmark of such interactions is ellipsis, a phenomenon whereby a chunk of an utterance is interpreted, but not heard. Thus, in a sentence like 1, the second clause (which illustrates a sluicing case, see §4.1. below) contains a wh-expression (how many) that stands as the remnant of a process that removes phonetic information that can be retrieved from the preceding discourse. (1) Judas betrayed his friends for some pieces of silver, but I don’t remember how many. The literature on ellipsis over the last decades is vast, including books, doctoral dissertations and many handbook papers/volumes (cf. Gallego, 2011; Brucart & MacDonald, 2012; van Craenenbroeck & Merchant, 2013; Yoshida et al., 2014; van Craenenbroeck & Temmerman, in press; and references therein). There are, at least, three key questions worth addressing about this topic: (i) under what parallelism conditions does ellipsis operate? (ii) what mechanism (operation) is responsible for the deletion of phonetic material? and (iii) what parameters regulate the crosslinguistic variation of ellipsis? Putting aside questions (i) and (iii) for the time being ((iii) is addressed below), there are various answers to (ii) that have been pursued in the literature. A first, non-