What's LF got to do with it?

Ivan Sag, Stanford University

Many researchers have assumed that LF identity is relevant to the analysis of VP Ellipsis (VPE). In this talk, I review a number of cases in which LF identity is difficult to reconcile with the facts, including the preservation of deictic reference, cross-discourse reference preservation, inference-based VPE, and active-passive mismatches. I argue that only a more semantic approach has the potential to provide a unified account of VPE. LF-based analyses at best account for an arbitrarily chosen subset of the known data. The approach I suggest embraces a minimalist grammar, leaving the range of elliptical interpretations to be explained not in terms of identity of linguistic representation, but by considerations of interpretation.

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