Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g. "Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.") categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they "undergenerate"); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and explaining the data on verb phrase-ellipsis. Five acceptability judgment experiments supported a "VP recycling hypothesis," which claims that when a syntactically-matching antecedent is not available, the listener/reader creates one using the materials at hand. Experiments 1 and 2 used verb phrase ellipsis sentences with antecedents ranging from perfect (a verb phrase in matrix verb phrase position) to impossible (a verb phrase containing only a deverbal word). Experiments 3 and 4 contrasted antecedents in verbal versus nominal gerund subjects. Experiment 5 explored the possibility that speakers are particularly likely to go beyond the grammar and produce elided constituents without perfect matching antecedents when the antecedent needed is less marked than the antecedent actually produced. This experiment contrasted active (unmarked) and passive antecedents to show that readers seem to honor such a tendency.

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The paper examines variation in the interpretations of imperfectives in Slavic, Romance, and Jê (Mẽbengokre). It develops a core modal analysis for an imperfective operator (IMPF) within situation semantics, coupled with languagespecific constraints formally encoded in modal bases. Cross-linguistic contrasts in the interpretation of imperfectives are explained in terms of variation in modal bases for IMPF, lexicalization patterns, and its interactions with other operators. The proposal accounts for why Romance languages use imperfectives to make reference to past plans while most Slavic languages do not, as well as for narrative uses specific to Romance languages, and factual uses specific to some Slavic languages. The proposal also accounts for lexically specified aspectual operators in Mẽbengokre, as well as language-specific interaction between IMPF and other modal operators, as in the Bulgarian Renarrated Mood, and two different semantic instances of Slavic Involuntary States. Appealing to cross-linguistic evidence to argue for a view according to which IMPF makes significant semantic contributions in all occurrences, the paper shows how a modal analysis can account for well-known temporal properties of imperfectives. It also demonstrates that data from closely related as well as unrelated languages provide evidence for an invariant semantic core behind imperfectivity.

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