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Bookmark and Share Paper 2707

Head Movement as a PF-Phenomenon: Evidence from Identity under Ellipsis
Erik Schoorlemmer and Tanja Temmerman
232-240 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the status of head movement in the grammar. We claim that there are instances of head movement that take place in the PF-component. The relevant cases involve verbal head movement out of an elided VP (known in the literature as verb-stranding VP-ellipsis). Crucially, the verb in this construction is subject to an identity requirement, just like elements inside an ellipsis site. We argue that this follows straightforwardly if the verb undergoes head movement at PF in these cases. The verb then remains inside the ellipsis site in narrow syntax and at LF. This ensures that the verb and elided elements are subject to the same general identity requirement at LF. Our account is strengthened by the observation that elements that undergo syntactic phrasal movement out of an ellipsis site are not subject to such a requirement. In addition, we argue that analyses involving syntactic head movement cannot account for the identity facts in verb-stranding VP-ellipsis.

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