Resolution of Ellipsis in Stacked VPs

Abstract

This paper investigates previously noted but not satisfactorily explained data, in which an elided VP is embedded within another elided VP. Specifically, the first VP can get a sloppy reading, for which the preceding sentence does not offer an appropriate antecedent directly. As for this elliptical construction, Tomioka (2008) assumes that VP Ellipsis is an instance of PF deletion, based on Merchant (2001). He further proposes the identity condition for E-marked constituents. We, however, show that the issue here is not directly related to ‘E-feature’ since the relevant examples do not necessarily bear ‘E-feature’. Rather, the sloppy reading concerns itself with pro-usages of VP (pro here representing a VP that is to undergo ellipsis/substitution after meeting the identity condition on it), regardless of whether the VP is realized as ‘null’ or ‘do so’. We thus seek a theoretically sound analysis, which is partly similar to Tomioka (2008) in that it resorts to the course of derivation for an account of ellipsis, but crucially differs from Tomioka (2008) in that it takes pro-usages of VP rather than E-feature into serious consideration in the account of sloppy readings available to elliptical VPs. The proposed analysis further implies that not only inflectional features but lexical features (in some limited contexts) can be ignored in the computation of identity for VP ellipsis.