On Vehicle Change and Ellipsis Identity
Klaus Abels
July 2022
 

This article shows that, contrary to what was claimed in Fiengo and May 1994, vehicle change under ellipsis is not symmetric. Fiengo and May based their claim crucially on strict readings of elliptical structures, but as pointed out by Kitagawa 1991; Oku 1998; Safir 2004, such examples are open to an analysis sidestepping vehicle change in favour of covaluation. Once covaluation can be ruled out, it turns out that vehicle change is asymmetric: vehicle change is the retreat to the pronominal form. In this paper, covaluation is, for the first time, systematically controlled by considering dependent strict readings. The article provides an explanation of the vehicle change asymmetry in terms of a structural recoverability condition on deletion in the spirit of Oku’s Subset Copy Principle and Chung No New Words, which builds crucially on the idea that pronouns are, strcucturally, subsumed by definite DPs and SELF-anaphors.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006709
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: ms. UCL
keywords: ellipsis, binding theory, vehicle change, beta-occurrence, recoverability of deletion, referential dependency, covaluation, accidental coreference, anaphor, condition c, self anaphor, dependent strict readings, structure of dp, structure of pronouns, structure of anaphors, semantics, syntax
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