Jason Merchant

Voice and Ellipsis

Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts appear to indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VPellipsis facts fall into place if the head that determines voice is external to the phrase being elided, here argued to be vP; such an account can only be framed in approaches that allow syntactic features to be separated from the heads on which they are morphologically realized. Alternatives to this syntactic, articulated view of ellipsis and voice either undergenerate or overgenerate.

ATTRIBUTIVE COMPARATIVE DELETION

Comparatives are among the most extensively investigatedconstructions in generative grammar, yet comparativesinvolving attributive adjectives have received a relativelysmall amount of attention. This paper investigates a complexarray of facts in this domain that shows that attributivecomparatives, unlike other comparatives, are well-formed onlyif some type of ellipsis operation applies within thecomparative clause. Incorporating data from English, Polish,Czech, Greek, and Bulgarian, we argue that these facts supporttwo important conclusions. First, violations of Rosss LeftBranch Condition that involve attributive modifiers should notbe accounted for in terms of constraints on LF representations(such as the Empty Category Principle), but rather in terms ofthe principle of Full Interpretation at the PF interface. Second,ellipsis must be analyzed as deletion of syntactic material fromthe phonological representation. In addition, we present newevidence from pseudogapping constructions that favors anarticulated syntax of attributive modification in which certaintypes of attributive modifiers may occur outside DP.

Antecedents‐contained Deletion in Negative Polarity Items

(1) a. That boy won’t do a damn thing I ask him to. b. Abby doesn’t have to read anything we did when we were young. c. Ben rarely grants an interview to a single reporter who wants him to. d. Jack wasn’t able to get an interview with a single person you were. e. The suspect didn’t answer a single question he was required to. These examples show that antecedent-contained deletion can occur inside negative polarity items. In the next two sections, I briefly review our current understanding of antecedentcontained deletion and negative polarity items, showing how the standard analyses come into conflict when confronted with examples like those in (1). In the final section, I show that by giving up part of the assumptions underlying these orthodox analyses, we can successfully accommodate these data without losing the advantages of the standard accounts of these phenomena.

How Much Context Is Enough?: Two Cases of Span-Conditioned Stem Allomorphy

Greek voice and aspect jointly condition verbal stem allomorphy, including suppletion. Negation and tense in English do likewise. These cases show that stem allomorphy cannot be restricted to cases where the conditioning element is structurally adjacent to the element that displays allomorphic variation. But neither is contextual allomorphy entirely free from locality constraints: allomorphy can be conditioned only by a span, a contiguous set of heads in an extended projection.

Reverse sluicing in English and Greek

In this article we identify and analyze a novel elliptical phenomenon in English and Greek which we dub reverse sluicing. We show that a complete account of reverse sluicing follows from an extension of the analysis of sluicing proposed in Chung, Ladusaw, and McCloskey (1995). Chung et al.s operation of IP-copy, which reconstructs a missing IP at LF, supplemented by the standard Heimian analysis of indefinites, can successfully capture the facts in Greek. We discuss the differences between English and Greek and argue that these differences can be reduced to an independent difference in the availability of certain empty categories in the two languages. We claim further that the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995) provides a natural account for the restrictions on the interpretation of the indefinite variables involved.

Economy, The Copy Theory, and Antecedent-Contained Deletion

ECONOMY, THE COPY THEORY, AND ANTECEDENT-CONTAINED DELETION Jason Merchant Northwestern University Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Cinque, Guglielmo. 1995. Italian syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culicover, Peter. 1976. Syntax. New York: Academic Press. Emonds, Joseph. 1978. The verbal complex V′-V in French. Linguistic Inquiry 9:151–175. Giorgi, Alessandra, and Giuseppe Longobardi. 1991. The syntax of noun phrases: Configuration, parameters and empty categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Li, Yen-hui Audrey. 1998. Argument determiner phrases and number phrases. Linguistic Inquiry 29:693–702. Longobardi, Giuseppe. 1994. Reference and proper names. Linguistic Inquiry 25:609–665. Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20:365–424. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Radford, Andrew. 1997. Syntactic theory and the structure of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ritter, Elizabeth. 1991. Two functional categories in noun phrases: Evidence from Modern Hebrew. In Syntax and semantics 25: Perspectives on phrase structure: Heads and licensing, ed. Susan Rothstein, 37–62. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press. Roberts, Ian. 1998. Have/Be raising, Move F, and Procrastinate. Linguistic Inquiry 29:113–125. Stowell, Tim. 1981. Origins of phrase structure. Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Valois, Daniel. 1991a. The internal syntax of DP. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Valois, Daniel. 1991b. The internal syntax of DP and adjective placement in French and English. In NELS 21, 352–367. GLSA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Vikner, Sten. 1995. Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic languages. New York: Oxford University Press.

The morphosyntax of the periphrastic future under negation in Cypriot Greek

In Cypriot Greek, the negated future is marked by the element tha, which appears instead of the expected present tense copula and a selected subordinating element. This paper documents the distribution of this item for the first time, and presents an analysis in Distributed Morphology that analyzes tha as a portmanteau morpheme realizing two heads in the context of negation. This analysis requires that spans (or targets of Fusion) can include a verb and the head of its C complement.

An Embarrassment of Riches? Cutting Up the Elliptical Pie

Kempson, Cann, Gregoromichelaki, and Chatzikyriakidis (henceforth KCGC) offer us a plethora of wonderful phenomena which they argue can be best modeled using a dynamic syntax that has modular resources, addressing a range of what appear to be elliptical data. The authors also show that the suggestions that were made in Merchant (2004) regarding “correctives and multi-speaker cooperative sentence construction and certain confirmatory, clarificational, and elaborative fragments” (p. 709) fail to cover the full range of data. Their paper represents a laudatory step toward building a system of syntax that is fully responsive to questions of incremental parsing, an issue highlighted by Phillips and Parker (2014), for example. Here I will concentrate particularly on their proposals about the nature of fragments and ellipsis. KCGC discuss the following kinds of data in this domain, which I will organize into five groups (the numbers refer to the example numbers in the KCGC paper).

The Dynamics of Ellipsis

Kempson, Cann, Gregoromichelaki, and Chatzikyriakidis (henceforth KCGC) report on a theory of ellipsis in the idiom of Dynamic Syntax, and contrast it with other approaches. Underlying this contrast is the assumption that other grammatical traditions either must, or at least choose to, treat all sentence fragments as instances of ellipsis. This assumption is discussed further in Kobele [2016]. We think that the question of whether to analyze a particular sentence fragment in terms of ellipsis should be influenced by empirical considerations. Standard diagnostics for the presence of ellipsis (as laid out for example in Merchant [2013b]) would not suggest that most of what is discussed is in fact elliptical. Fragments themselves come in many stripes, and some may have sentential sources (and thus be thought of as elliptical, such as fragment answers, as analyzed in Merchant [2004]), and many others may not (such as names, titles, and clarificational phrases, among the many others listed in Merchant [2010]). Merchant [2016] scrutinizes the fragments in KCGC from this perspective. We will not here attempt to undertake this work, but rather restrict our attention to cases such as VP-ellipsis or predicate ellipsis that all approaches agree form central elliptical explicanda. In this response we take a step back, and focus on the basic idea on which KCGC’s theory of ellipsis is based. This fundamental idea is in fact shared by many of the approaches KCGC critique. We set out some basic parameters of this space, and describe how different theoretical choices influence possible descriptions of elliptical phenomena. Finally, we discuss what kinds of constructions pose difficulties for this approach to ellipsis, describe how the analysis of Kobele [2015] deals with them, and suggest that KCGC’s particular implementation of this approach to ellipsis may flounder here.