VP ellipsis, phases and the syntax of morphology

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to propose a derivational account of the salient syntactic properties of VP ellipsis constructions, both in languages like English and in the languages that Goldberg (2005) dubs “V-stranding VPE languages”. The analysis makes reference to (and offers evidence for) the claim that derivations proceed by phases, cf. Chomsky (2000, 2001a). Phases turn out to be relevant to the characterization of the heads that license VP ellipsis—only phase heads have the required property. They also shed light on the asymmetry between the languages that display VP ellipsis and those that do not. It appears that in the former, the uninterpretable [tense] feature of the phase head v is valued phase-internally, at the v-level, whereas in the latter, it is not. Another important claim embodied in the analysis developed here is that the morphosyntactic properties of verbal forms across languages must be part of any account of VP ellipsis. They turn out to be relevant, not to the definition of the Identity Condition on VP ellipsis, as Lasnik (1995) claims, but to the proper characterization of its licenser.