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.

Finite clausal arguments differ from other arguments—and other CPs—in two fundamental ways: (a) they do not move leftward ( Koster 1978 , Alrenga 2005 , Takahashi 2010 , Moulton 2013 ) and (b) they may combine with nouns that do not accept arguments ( Stowell 1981 , Grimshaw 1990 ). I argue that finite clausal arguments are predicates of propositional content (type 〈e,〈s,t〉〉), following proposals in Kratzer 2006 , Moulton 2009 . They combine with nouns by Predicate Modification, explaining (b). In order to complement verbs, CPs trigger two type-driven leftward movements (CP-movement and remnant AspPfronting). I argue that the resulting configuration prevents further leftward movement of clausal arguments, explaining (a). Also derived are the right-peripheral position of CPs relative to arguments and the verbal complex in Germanic, freezing effects in the VP, extraction from and binding into CPs, and the similarities and differences among CP argument extraposition, heavy NP shift, and relative clause extraposition. More broadly, the proposal demonstrates that copies can denote restricted variables, but need not be DPs (cf. Fox 2002 , Takahashi 2010 , Johnson 2012 ).

Novel reconstruction data is introduced which argues that clauses do not move leftward, thus contributing to a long-standing debate about sentential subjects and topics (Koster 1978, Alrenga 2005. Although fronted clauses appear to reconstruct for variablebinding purposes, I offer several arguments that these bound-variable interpretations are only apparent. First, left-dislocated CPs do not exhibit the kinds of reconstruction interactions that hold of other moved constituents, as discovered by Lebeaux (1991). Second, we find apparent bound variables in left-dislocated CPs that can be shown to have no movement source that would provide a site for reconstruction. I will then provide a detailed analysis that marshals the semantics of de re pronouns to explain why covariation without reconstruction is available in these dislocated CPs. Aside from offering a detailed syntax-semantics for clausal complementation, I make the case that there must be syntactic derivations of sentential subjects and topics that do not involve movement and that a parsimonious theory rules out movement of clausal arguments altogether.

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