Kramer and Rawlins (2011) and Holmberg (2013Holmberg ( , 2016 suggest that the particles yes and no contain clausal structure that undergoes PF-deletion, assimilating them to elliptical constructions such as fragment answers.
holmberg (2016), adopting the movement-deletion approaches for elliptical constructions suggested by Merchant (2001Merchant ( , 2004 and subsequent work, suggests that the standalone answer particle as well as echoed verb are derived from clausal ellipsis as represented in the following: Accepting hamblin's (1973) view that polar questions are propositional abstracts (having the set of alternative propositions p and ¬ p), holmberg (2016) suggests that polar questions like (10) evoke the variable Pol with two possible values: (10) in turn then means 'What is the value of [± pol] such that the student came?'