Constraining Head-Stranding Ellipsis

Abstract

Ellipsis of a constituent whose head has moved out of it (“headless ellipsis”) is possible in some cases but not in others. Headless ellipsis is licensed only if the stranded head has not crossed a Spell-Out domain. The reason is that the silencing instruction responsible for ellipsis must be PF-visible on the head of the elided constituent, and PF-visibility is cut off at Spell-Out domain boundaries. A parallel effect is observed with remnants of head movement that are frozen for movement (“headless movement”). The two effects can possibly be united if ellipsis and copy deletion recruit the same silencing instruction at PF, hosted on the head of the deleted constituent. A third, mirror-image effect is observed with reprise fragments, which must be visibly headed. This time head movement removes the PF instruction that spares these fragments from ellipsis. Overall, these phenomena establish the significance of headedness for the syntax-PF interface.

Verb-second and the verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis debate

“…does not resolve some of the major questions facing any account of head-stranding ellipsis that Landau's (2020a;b) contributions highlight. The final section of this article identifies next steps for the wider program of research.…”

“…Since each separate instance of AE should be optional, and there is no obvious mechanism by which the ellipsis of any one internal argument can be linked to the ellipsis of another, this fact is hard to explain under the AE-approach to head-stranding strings. Consider Portuguese, for which Landau (2020a) claims that for at least some speakers, verb-stranding strings are derived solely by AE. 4 After discussing some variation in the grammaticality judgements for the interpretation of adverbs in verb-stranding structures in Portuguese, Landau (2020a) writes: "in any event, the fact that some (maybe most) speakers exclude adjuncts in properly constructed OG sentences… indicates that AE is the only elliptical strategy available to them" (p. 355).…”

Duality of control in gerundive complements of P

“…The reason is that P in the implicative construction is a two-place predicator, which forms a nonmaximal projection with the gerund, and nonmaximal projections resist movement. The [14] If PredP is headed by a null Pred 0 head, rather than by the lexical preposition, then its immobility might follow from the ban on filling EPP (or 'criterial') positions with 'empty-headed' phrases, possibly extending to remnants of head movement as well ('Takano's generalization'; see Takano 2000;Landau 2007Landau , 2020Funakoshi 2012). Note that the VP-layer of a vP-shell, headed by the verbal trace, cannot be displaced either; (i) is a standard ditransitive construction and (ii)-(iii) are nonimplicative P-gerund constructions.…”

Reassessing the existence of verb-stranding vP-ellipsis in Brazilian Portuguese

“…The present article builds upon a series of recent articles by Landau (2018Landau ( , 2020aLandau ( , 2020b. In 2018 and 2020b, Landau examines four languages which were previously thought to allow VVPE (Hebrew, in 2018;Hindi, European Portuguese, and Russian, in 2020b) and argues that these languages do not permit VVPE.…”