Abstract
Lipták and Saab (2014) argue that the availability of both XP-ellipsis and X-movement out of XP within a particular language implicates the availability of the X-stranding XP-ellipsis pattern in that language, as seen in the verbal domains of Hebrew and Irish for example. They further argue that this implication can be used to diagnose the absence of X-movement in a language (i.e. if it has XP-ellipsis but lacks the X-stranding pattern). In this reply, I show that this diagnostic is flawed: a language can have the relevant ingredients and yet lack the X-stranding pattern that the authors predict to be present, as in Mainland Scandinavian, which has verb-second but lacks verb-stranding VP-ellipsis. I argue that such exceptions are principled: the X-stranding pattern arises only if the operations responsible for these phenomena are timed such that the trigger for X-movement out of XP is merged earlier than, or at the same time as, the trigger for XP-ellipsis. I revise Lipták and Saab’s (2014) implicational statement accordingly.
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Notes
Although Lipták and Saab’s arguments are primarily based in the nominal domain, the vast majority of work in X-stranding XPE concerns the verbal domain: see Goldberg (2005) and references therein.
Lipták and Saab use the term “X-raising,” but for consistency I use the term X-movement throughout. As Lipták and Saab note, their conditions (and accompanying diagnostic) have nothing to say about X-movement within XP. Since XP-internal movement will not be relevant for us either, I use the term X-movement strictly to refer to movement of X to a position outside of XP.
As noted in fn. 2, Lipták and Saab’s diagnostic has nothing to say about X-movement within XP, so it is left aside there and here.
See Thoms (2012) for more details on the status of VPE across the Scandinavian language family.
Regarding at least the Norwegian judgments reported here, a reviewer notes that while this reflects the intuitions of many speakers, there is also a group of speakers who allow what looks like the V-stranding pattern. However, as the reviewer points out, some or all of the relevant cases may in fact involve object drop, given that the nature of the missing object plays a role:
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The asymmetry here suggests that genuine V-stranding VPE is not at work in this variety of Norwegian, but determining this will require applying tests of the sort described in Goldberg (2005) to rule out the possibility of object drop, which I leave to future work. For now, the analysis of Norwegian I put forth here is intended to capture the mainstream variety only.
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See Bentzen et al. (2013) in particular for arguments that examples such as (8c) exhibit VPE-like properties despite the presence of det. Ørsnes (2011) argues that gøre (at least in Danish) has the status of a main (raising) verb, despite exhibiting certain auxiliary-like qualities. Its behavior in the context of VPE, especially with respect to the analysis to come, is clearly auxiliary-like (and not main verb-like). See fn. 16 for related discussion.
Lipták and Saab provide a conceptual argument against such a bleeding effect in their discussion of the Spanish nominal domain; I address this in Sect. 4.3. Lipták and Saab also claim that similar timing-based accounts of Merchant’s (2001:62) Sluicing-Comp Generalization are not counterexamples to their CXPE; I return to this in Sect. 5.
The analysis I propose here represents just one possible explanation for the absence of V-stranding VPE in Mainland Scandinavian. While other possible explanations for this absence could be pursued—for example, those based on theories of ellipsis licensing that do not make use of [E], such as Thoms’s (2010) movement-based theory—the present approach has the advantage of straightforwardly reconciling several ellipsis-independent facts about Mainland Scandinavian syntax. See below for further discussion.
See Sect. 4.3 on derivations in which single head is responsible for triggering both X-movement and XP-ellipsis.
See Thoms (2010) for an alternative approach to ellipsis licensing.
Aelbrecht (2010) argues that this inaccessibility arises because satisfaction of [E] triggers immediate Spell-Out of the elided constituent: in essence, it is rendered as a phase shipped off to the interfaces, meaning its internal structure cannot be further manipulated by elements higher in the structure. Aelbrecht is careful to note that this shipping-off to the interfaces of the elided constituent is a consequence of [E], and does not necessarily require that the constituent in question have phasal status independent of ellipsis. These details are not critical to the present discussion; see Aelbrecht (2010:Sect. 3.2).
See op. cit. for the raising status of modals in Dutch. Note that adjuncts also cannot extract from MCE sites (Aelbrecht 2010:Sect. 3.4); I leave this aside. Finally, as Aelbrecht notes, the acceptability of MCE in Dutch is subject to dialectal variation. The judgments given here are those reported by Aelbrecht.
Aelbrecht (2010:ch. 4) notes that the wh- phrase undergoes intermediate movement to its phase’s edge to satisfy its edge features, but this is irrelevant here: the MCE ellipsis site properly includes this phase (but the VPE site does not).
There are of course languages with independent V-to-T that lack the V-stranding VPE pattern, e.g. French; however, French lacks a VPE operation entirely (Lobeck 1995). This is even true within the larger Scandinavian family: for instance, Vikner (1995:ch. 5) argues that Icelandic has V-to-T independent of V2; however, Icelandic happens to lack VPE entirely as well (Thoms 2012). I am not aware of any V2 language that also has independent productive V-to-T and VPE, though Kashmiri and Breton (e.g.) are candidates to be explored.
A reviewer asks why auxiliaries are special in this regard (that is, why their appearance in VPE contexts is not bled as well), especially since they generally pattern like main verbs in Mainland Scandinavian in appearing beneath medial adverbs and negation in non-V2 contexts (Vikner 1995). If the analysis I lay out here is correct, one way of making sense of these facts is to assume a more articulated view of the verbal domain, such that auxiliaries are base-generated below negation and medial adverbs, but above/outside the VPE site (e.g. as the hypothetical head Y in (11) is). This would explain why movement of auxiliaries is never bled by VPE: they are never within the VPE site to begin with. This sort of approach finds independent support from the analysis of English auxiliaries, whose own ability to survive VPE when they cannot raise to T (e.g. in multiple-auxiliary contexts) has led Aelbrecht (2010), Sailor (2014), and others to argue that they are base-generated outside the ellipsis site (at least in some cases). I leave it to future work to determine whether this proposed positional asymmetry between main verbs and auxiliaries can be verified independent of VPE in Mainland Scandinavian. (See also discussion of the base position of gøre ‘do’: Houser et al. 2011; Platzack 2012; and Bentzen et al. 2013.)
See discussion of the Sluicing-Comp Generalization in Sect. 5 below.
I note in passing that an affirmative version of Lipták and Saab’s proposed head movement diagnostic is untenable as well, by way of being circular: that is, we cannot use the presence of X-stranding XPE to diagnose X-movement in a language, since even distinguishing X-stranding XPE from superficially similar-looking phenomena involving omission of a smaller element (e.g. argument drop in ostensible V-stranding contexts) requires independent evidence of X-movement out of XP. See Goldberg (2005) for extensive discussion.
Beyond these two, I know of only one other claim of ellipsis bleeding head movement: that of V-to-v movement in pseudogapping (Lasnik 1999; Boeckx and Stjepanović 2001). As that particular analysis also bears on the question of whether head movement takes place in the narrow syntax or at PF, I delay treatment of it to Sect. 7.
See van Craenenbroeck and Lipták (2013) for additional discussion, including some arguments against a reduced-cleft analysis for such examples.
The category of this complement is unclear in van Craenenbroeck and Lipták (2008); however, in a more recent article, the same authors argue that it is in fact TP (van Craenenbroeck and Lipták 2013). For additional arguments that Foc is outside the sluicing ellipsis site, see Baltin’s (2010) discussion of the Gungbe focus marker surviving sluicing.
The drawback to this sort of approach is that it gives up the Spec-Head relationship that exists between the sluicing remainder and the sluicing licenser—a relationship that forms the foundation of the sluicing typology developed in van Craenenbroeck and Lipták (2013). However, this relationship may still hold in Hungarian if the sluicing remainder moves through the specifier of Y\(_{\mathrm{[E]}}\) on its way to [Spec, FocP]. These predictions remain to be explored.
This is not to say that ellipsis in Hungarian cannot bleed head movement in principle; rather, there is simply no evidence of it in the data discussed by van Craenenbroeck and Lipták (2008).
For this reason, I leave aside another interesting puzzle brought to my attention by a reviewer, namely, in at least Danish, VPE bleeds object shift (OS), but does not bleed object wh-extraction:
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I do not attempt to extend the derivational timing account proposed here for X-movement to this apparent bleeding of OS, though such an extension may be achievable. Of course, it may also be that OS is blocked in the context of VPE for some other reason (e.g. if OS is not triggered during the derivation in the same way that X-movement is, as some PF-based accounts of OS have maintained, e.g. Holmberg 1999).
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Lipták and Saab take no firm stance on the ongoing head movement debate.
A conceivable starting point might be Arregi and Nevins (2012), who argue that certain rule orderings must exist at PF, and suggest that at least some of these need not be stipulated. However, they do not discuss ellipsis phenomena whatsoever, and it is unclear to what extent their proposal could be extended to capture these phenomena.
As Boeckx and Stjepanović (2001:352) put it, “...not being syntactically driven, head movement and ellipsis (both PF operations, we assume) compete, the choice between them being determined by independent factors.”
Landau (2006) suggests that Hebrew has V-stranding VPE precisely because it happens to lack a pleonastic verb equivalent to English do. This cannot be correct, however: Welsh has a do-support operation that can arise in VPE contexts, but it also allows V-stranding VPE in some contexts (Rouveret 2005). If anything, then, Welsh would be the best candidate for the free ordering of VPE and V-movement predicted in Boeckx and Stjepanović (2001), but then the existence of Hebrew and other strictly V-stranding VPE languages militates against this. See Rouveret (2005) for additional arguments that V-movement takes place in the narrow syntax.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Maziar Toosarvandani for contributions to early versions of this work. For helpful feedback, thanks also go to Jason Merchant, Gary Thoms, and Mark de Vries; to audiences at the LSA Annual Meeting 2015, Cambridge SyntaxLab 2016, the University of Konstanz, and Ulster University; and, to three anonymous reviewers.
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Sailor, C. The typology of head movement and ellipsis. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 36, 851–875 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9391-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9391-y