Common Contracts
1 similar Maxelide and Elliptical Feature Agreement contracts
MaxElide and Elliptical Feature AgreementMaxelide and Elliptical Feature Agreement • September 4th, 2008
MaxElide: Merchant (2008) proposes a constraint on ellipsis, called MaxElide, that ellipsis must target the largest constituent possible if the elided constituent contains an A’-trace (Sag 1976, Williams 1977, Lasnik 2001, Takahashi and Fox 2005, among others). Assuming that (1a) is the source of the VP-ellipsis (1b) and sluicing (1c), only sluicing is possible. The impossibility of VP-ellipsis is attributed to MaxElide. Ellipsis Phrase (EP): However, it is unclear under Merchant’s analysis what having an A’-trace has to do with MaxElide. This paper provides a syntactic analysis of MaxElide, which attributes MaxElide effects to locality of agreement between a probe and E(lliptical) features. Following Merchant (2001, 2006), I assume that some functional head bears an E feature for ellipsis (i.e. C for sluicing and v for VP-ellipsis) whenever the complement of the E feature is e-GIVEN. Merchant’s (2001) e-GIVENness requires roughly that the ellipsis clause and antecedent clause mutually
