Voice and Ellipsis

Abstract

Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts appear to indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VPellipsis facts fall into place if the head that determines voice is external to the phrase being elided, here argued to be vP; such an account can only be framed in approaches that allow syntactic features to be separated from the heads on which they are morphologically realized. Alternatives to this syntactic, articulated view of ellipsis and voice either undergenerate or overgenerate.The conditions that regulate the distribution of ellipsis have long held a central place in linguistic theory because of the possibility they raise for shedding light on fundamental questions about the form-meaning mapping. Various theories in the last four decades have used elliptical constructions as testing grounds for exploring the nature of the various posited components of the grammar, both syntax-phonology interactions and syntax-semantic ones. Elliptical phenomena were, and continue to be, a central point in the debate over the nature of linguistic representations as well. Broadly speaking, two strands are distinguishable: those that take ellipsis to be entirely a semantic phenomenon, and those that posit that ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form (either in lieu of semantic form or as a supplement to it). The question is important because how it is answered has straightforward implications for the fundamentals of linguistic theory. If syntactic form is implicated, grammar formalisms that eschew unpronounced syntactic structures must be amended for judgments on the German.The paper published here was originally completed in 2007. It did not seem wise to try to update it to take into account all the more recent developments in the literature on these matters (though see Chung 2013 for a recent approach and references); and because the facts it presents and the basic structural analysis it gives have been cited in the interim, it seems better in the interests of scholarship to present it essentially as originally written, with minimal changes.

Syntactic identity, Parallelism and accommodated antecedents

“…This is quite distinct from the account that is given by Merchant (2013b), where the crucial difference is 265 the size of the ellipsis site. With VP-ellipsis, the ellipsis site is as small as just the VP, and Voice is external…”

To be or not to be elided: VP ellipsis revisited

“…Merchant (2008aMerchant ( , 2013 notes that voice mismatches between antecedent and ellipsis clause are possible under ellipsis: the antecedent clause may be active, whilst the ellipsis clause bares passive voice, and vice versa (but see Kehler 2002 for restrictions on voice mismatches).…”

Annotating the Implicit Content of Sluices

“…While originally it was thought that parallelism should be defined in purely semantic terms, evidence has steadily accumulated that the availability of sluicing is sensitive to the morphosyntactic structure of the antecedent. First, unlike VPE (Kehler, 2002), sluicing does not tolerate voice mismatches (Merchant, 2001;Chung, 2005;Chung et al, 2011;Anderbois, 2010;Chung, 2013;Merchant, 2007): (3) a. The candidate was abducted but we don't know who by/by who.…”