Reading Carefully: Verb Movement and Ellipsis in a Verb-Final Language

Verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VVPE) has been identified in a variety of languages, including Irish (McCloskey 1991), Hebrew (Doron 1991; Goldberg 2005), Russian (Gribanova 2013a, b), and Hindi-Urdu (Manetta, 2018). The present paper concerns the socalled “adverb test” for diagnosing VVPE (e.g. Oku 1998; Goldberg 2005; Simpson, Chowdhury, and Menon 2013), and in particular a solution to the puzzling failure of this test in languages which have otherwise been argued to exhibit VVPE. I propose an account which posits that the apparent failure of the adverb test in these contexts emerges due to the interaction of ellipsis, verb movement, and contrastive polarity (following insights in Gribanova 2017). I claim that in contrastive environments in which the verb moves as high as a TP-external Polarity head, MaxElide will force ellipsis of the largest possible constituent. The upshot of this claim is that the string which would appear to indicate failure of the adverb test is not a string generated by ellipsis at all, but instead by a missing internal argument. This small project contributes to the wider program of recent work investigating the nature of head movement and its role in the syntax (Chomsky 2001; Hartman 2011; LaCara 2016; McCloskey 2016; Keine and Bhatt 2016; Gribanova and Mikkelsen, 2018; Manetta, 2018)

Copy theory in wh-in-situ languages: Sluicing in Hindi-Urdu

Hindi-Urdu is known to be one of the wh-in-situ languages exhibiting a sluicing-like construction. Although many have proposed alternative accounts of such strings in wh-in-situ languages (e.g. Kizu 1997, Toosarvandani 2009, Gribanova 2011, Hankamer 2010), I argue that apparent sluicing in Hindi-Urdu can be analyzed in a manner consistent with the notion that the syntax of a sluice is the syntax of a regular wh-question (Ross 1969, Merchant 2001). Assuming the copy theory of movement (Chomsky & Lasnik 1993, Chomsky 1993, i.a.), we can understand sluicing in Hindi-Urdu as an exceptional instance of the pronunciation of the top copy in a wh-chain, correctly predicting that Hindi-Urdusluiced structures have properties similar to genuine sluices in languages like English. This article pursues a continued refinement in the implementation of copy theory in wh-in-situ languages and importantly, contributes to the current line of work investigating intra-linguistic variation among wh-in-situ languages and the ways in which constellations of properties of wh-dependencies and ellipsis processes in these languages are best understood

Ellipsis in Wh -in-Situ Languages: Deriving Apparent Sluicing in Hindi-Urdu and Uzbek Ellipsis in Wh-in-Situ Languages: Deriving Apparent Sluicing in Hindi-Urdu and Uzbek

Wh-in-situ languages have a special role to play in investigating the relation between the wh-syntax of a language and the availability of sluicing-like constructions (SLCs)