ON VP ELLIPSIS AND THE IDENTITY CONDITION

This paper is concerned with the licensing condition – often referred to as the identity condition (IC, henceforth) – on VP-ellipsis (VPE) in English; we are particularly interested in the cases of successful VPE under non-identity (VPEN). This paper briefly reports on preliminary results of an exploratory investigation on an alternative condition to the IC that substitutes the notion of nondistinctness for identity. It has been recognized that successful VPE involves some sort of parallelism between the two VPs involved, as shown in (1) and (2a); the failure of this results in ungrammaticality (2b). Throughout the discussion below, we use ‘<...>’ for the elided VP, and VP1 and VP2 as in (1b) are respectively referred to as antecedent (A-)VP and target (T-)VP.

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