Parallelism for (Negative) Indefinites under VP Ellipsis

Abstract

Craenenbroeck and Temmerman (2017) examine the scopal pattern of English negative indefinites in VP-ellipsis contexts. Their main argument is that negative indefinites cannot take scope out of a verbal ellipsis site. They note that negative indefinites require fusion under adjacency between the clausal polarity head and an indefinite determiner under the structural configuration of multi-dominance. However, this paper shows that these attempts are not promising, by demonstrating that English negative indefinites in ellipsis environments simply need to satisfy the syntactic identity condition on ellipsis. The arguments come from a certain scope interaction between indefinites and VP ellipsis. This paper ultimately shows that to capture the whole range of relevant data, satisfying the Identity/Parallelism condition must be a prerequisite for ellipsis.