Sloppy symmetry under ellipsis
-
Jeroen van Craenenbroeck
und
Kyle Johnson
Abstract
This paper focuses on the behavior of symmetric predicates under ellipsis. Building on Stockwell (Stockwell, Richard. 2020. Contrast and verb phrase ellipsis: Triviality, symmetry, and competition. UCLA. Doctoral Dissertation), we examine the phenomenon of participant and transitivity switching under VP-ellipsis, which symmetric predicates permit but non-symmetric ones do not. While Stockwell takes this as evidence for a semantic identity condition on ellipsis, we show that semantic equivalence is too weak. Specifically, cases of participant or transitivity switching involving focus marking are wrongly predicted to be acceptable. We argue instead for a syntactic identity condition on ellipsis and sketch a new analysis of symmetric predicates as unaccusatives.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to the organizers and participants of the 32nd Colloquium on Generative Grammar. We are especially indebted to Jason Merchant, Gary Thoms, Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, Tanja Temmerman, Cora-Cavirani-Pots, Edoardo Cavirani, Engela De Villiers, Anastasiia Vyshnevska, Jianrong Yu, and Milan Řezáč for steering us clear of initial stumbles.
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- AGREEment and ellipsis
- Coerced inflected infinitives in Portuguese
- Agreement without agree: scattered, not distributed, agreement across modules
- Two routes to predicate ellipsis in Spanish: the clitic versus focus strategy
- Rethinking Right-node Raising
- No ellipsis-contained antecedents: adjunct-licensed ellipsis in Spanish
- Sloppy symmetry under ellipsis
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- AGREEment and ellipsis
- Coerced inflected infinitives in Portuguese
- Agreement without agree: scattered, not distributed, agreement across modules
- Two routes to predicate ellipsis in Spanish: the clitic versus focus strategy
- Rethinking Right-node Raising
- No ellipsis-contained antecedents: adjunct-licensed ellipsis in Spanish
- Sloppy symmetry under ellipsis
