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« Syntax Guru: Jason Merchant | Main | Tufts Workshop on Semiproductivity»

Jason Merchant Colloquium

Jason Merchant
University of Chicago

Explorations of the dark side of ellipsis

Friday, Apri 4, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26

Abstract

The nature of syntactic representations is a fierce battleground for competing theories of the human language faculty, with some recent high-profile attempts to make them extremely simple going so far as to claim that syntax is wysiwyg (what you see is what you get). On the basis of an examination of ellipsis structures in a number of languages, and a detailed investigation of the distribution of voice in English verb phrase and other ellipses, I show that these approaches cannot be correct, and that any adequate theory of syntax must posit objects (phrases and words) which do not have "surface" (that is, pronounced) manifestations. Briefly, the generalization that emerges is the "large" ellipses (like sluicing and fragment answers) do not tolerate voice mismatches between the elided phrase and its antecedent, while "small" ellipsis (like VP-ellipsis) do; I argue that this is a fact about the organization of the syntax, and not necessarily due to processing factors (pace Frazier 2007).

In particular, I argue that Voice is syntactically a separate head in English, and should not be conflated with v (or the head that introduces the external argument in transitives and unergatives, pace Kratzer 1996). Following what I dub "the Johnson strategy" (following Johnson 2001), the triggers of mismatch are outside the ellipsis site: "large" ellipsis will necessarily contain Voice, while VP-ellipsis in English does not (it targets vP, below Voice). Unfortunately, accounting for this set of data seems to require that we posit that the identity relation in ellipsis is at least partially sensitive to syntactic structure (pace Merchant 2001). This apparently leads to the dark side, an exploration of which I venture in the areas of implicit arguments, polarity items, and 'vehicle change' effects; for all these, I show that the Johnson strategy leads us to believe that morphological or "lexical" alternations are controlled or triggered by elements that are remote in the structure (and often unpronounced).

April 3, 2008 12:11 AM | 06:11 (2008-04-03) , colloquia