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Share Paper 2701

Orphans Hosted by VP Anaphora
Line Mikkelsen, Daniel Hardt, and Bjarne Ørsnes
178-186 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper examines PP orphans hosted by overt VP anaphora (... and you would do the same to me) and argues that they are fundamentally different from remnants of ellipsis (... and you would to me), contra Culicover & Jackendoff (2005) and Elbourne (2008). Where remnants behave as extractees, orphans do not, and we propose that orphans are base-generated adjuncts to VP. When its correlate is VP-internal, an orphan triggers lambda abstraction over the correlate, creating a "slot" for the orphan in the meaning reconstructed for the VP anaphor. We give evidence that lambda abstraction over the correlate is syntactically unconstrained and suggest that ill-formed examples run afoul of a pragmatic requirement that the orphan be a possible aboutness-topic.

Published in

Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Jaehoon Choi, E. Alan Hogue, Jeffrey Punske, Deniz Tat, Jessamyn Schertz, and Alex Trueman
Table of contents
Printed edition: $375.00