Syntactic Structures					Spring 2012
Assignment 11:  VP Ellipsis				Due Monday May 14

1.  There is an ellipsis process called "VP Ellipsis",
which is illustrated in (1)-(3):

(1)   I never put a snake in my pocket, but I might.

(2)   You were sitting in the front row, and I was too.

(3)   Did Harvey go to the store on his motorcycle yesterday?

      Yes, he did.
      Well, he might have.
      No, but he will tomorrow.

2.  One way (though not the only way) to account for this phenomenon
in a grammar is via a Transformational operation of deletion.  For
present purposes, we will adopt the assumption that there is such
a rule, and call it "VP Deletion".  Here are some questions about
VP Deletion.

(a)  What gets deleted?

     (Do you have really good evidence for that?)

(b)  What are the conditions on this deletion?

     (Be careful here: there are at least two fairly obvious conditions.
     If you force yourself to write an explicit transformational rule
     and test it, you will probably discover them.)

3.   Write an explicit transformational rule.

4.   With the VP deletion rule in hand, examples like the following show
     something interesting about the structure of Verb Phrases:

(1)   I never put a snake in my pocket, but I might.

(2)   You were sitting in the front row, and I was too.

(3)   Did Harvey go to the store on his motorcycle yesterday?

      Yes, he did.
      Well, he might have.
      No, but he will tomorrow.

(4)  Are you mad at me? ...  Yes, I am.

     What do these facts indicate about the structure of Verb Phrases?

5.   What does the following indicate?

(5)  We were hoping somebody would bring cookies, but nobody did.