The so-inversion construction revisited

Abstract

This paper deals with the so-inversion construction in English, as in John can speak French, and so can Ann, where the second conjunct is the construction in question. Arguing against Toda's (Linguistic Inquiry 38: 188–195, 2007) analysis, which involves ad hoc assumptions and theoretical and empirical problems, we propose the valid derivation of the so-inversion construction. Especially, we claim that the so-inversion construction allows a marked operation, amalgam head movement, which yields such sentences as Bill must be a genius and so must be Ann. An important implication of our analysis is that it is necessary to carefully distinguish between peripheral and typical examples in order to construct valid syntactic structures.