Speaker: Lorenzo Pinton (MIT)
Title: VP-ellipsis and parasitic gaps: observations on temporal modifiers and parallelism
Time: Wednesday, October 15th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: As the title suggests, in this LFRG I present ongoing work on PV-ellipsis and Parasitic Gaps. I discuss novel data involving parasitic gaps (henceforth PGs) in VP-ellipsis constructions. In particular, I present a series of minimal pairs and claim that the grammatical contrasts are mainly accounted for by the combination of a local parallelism condition on ellipsis in the style Takahashi and Fox (2005)/Fox and Katzir (2011), and Nissenbaum’s (1998; 2000) theory of PGs. First, the contrast between (1a) and (1b) is introduced to show that adjuncts with a PG cannot appear in the clause containing ellipsis, in contrast with adjuncts with no gap:
(1) a. *This is the song that John listened to, and this is the song that Mary did [listen to] after reading about. b. This is the song that John listened to, and this is the song that Mary did [listen to] after having a coffee .
More data in (2) show that there are actually instances in which a PG-adjunct can appear in the elided clause, but only if another PG-adjunct is present in the antecedent:
(2) a. This is the song that Rosa listened to after reading about, and this is the song that Karl did [listen to] before hearing about. b. *This is the song that Rosa listened to after turning on the radio, and this is the song that Karl did [listen to] before hearing about .
A third – semantic – constrast will also be introduced tin the talk. After considering observations from Hartman (2011) on the size of elided phrases, I will show the need for a silent element that merges in the same position as adjuncts that do not contain a PG. This need can be implemented either with a tense restrictor analysis of temporal modifiers (as for example presented in von Fintel and Heim (2011)) or with a silent pronominal version of temporal adjuncts, as long as this is restricted to non-PG adjuncts.