The aim of this paper is to argue for a particular analysis of null clausal
arguments in terms of ellipsis. It is first illustrated that null clausal arguments have
underlying syntactic structures that are subject to ellipsis. The main and novel
observation for this claim is that null clausal arguments exhibit the effect of the
parallelism constraint that other ellipsis constructions like verb phrase ellipsis are
also subject to, along the line of Takahashi (Proceedings of FAJL 6: formal
approaches to Japanese linguistics, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Cambridge,
pp 203–213, 2013). It then examines a hitherto unexplored construction, called
antecedent-contained clausal argument ellipsis, where a null clausal argument
appears to be properly contained by its antecedent. Although the construction can be
readily accommodated by assuming the ellipsis process that directly elides arguments
(argument ellipsis), it raises serious difficulties for its alternative analysis that
employs the ellipsis process targeting a VP whose head has evacuated it (verbstranding
VP-ellipsis). This paper thus provides a novel case where the argument
ellipsis analysis is required, no matter how well the verb-stranding VP-ellipsis
analysis accommodates other null argument phenomena.

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• Antecedent-contained clausal argument ellipsis