Syntax 3						F 2018

Non-assignment 3.5.  VP Ellipsis			Not Due TH October 18
Individual/Group Non-Assignment


1.  You are no doubt familiar with a phenomenon called "VP Ellipsis",
which is illustrated in (1)-(4):

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

(2)   You can be sitting in the front row if you want to.

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

      Yes, he did.

      Well, he might have.

      No, but he will tomorrow.

(4)   They think I'm afraid of them, but I'm not.

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.)

(c)  Is the VP Deletion transformation bounded?

(d)  Can it go backward?

(e)  Does it obey island constraints?

3.   A caution: VPE is not the only kind of ellipsis there is.
The following examples, for example, are *not* VPE:

(5)   Harvey keeps a snake in his pocket, and Bill a toad.

(6)   Harvey wants to try to begin to write a novel, and Bill a play.

This phenomenon, which is called "Gapping", is found only in
coordinate structures.  As you can see from exx (1-3), VPE is not
so restricted.

This is a non-assignment, so you don't have to write it up.  But you might want to
think about it.