On wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis bled by subject-auxiliary inversion

Abstract

Park, Myung-Kwan and Han, Sumi. 2016. On wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis bled by subject-auxiliary inversion. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 16-2, 447-468. This paper investigates wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis in English which is bled by subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI) applying only to the ellipsis clause but not to the antecedent clause. To elucidate the interaction of wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis with SAI, we first reinstate the requirement of successive cyclicity for wh-movement, which will leave behind a trace at the periphery of the VP that undergoes ellipsis. To boot, we redefine the domain for parallelism/identity on extraction-permitting ellipsis, proposing that it includes the three elements such as the extracted element, the ellipsis-licensing element, and the elided constituent. It will be shown below that both the reinstated general requirement for wh-movement and the redefined domain for parallelism are instrumental to accounting for the full paradigm of examples involving wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis interacting with SAI.