Kyle Johnson, following earlier gigs this semester by Rajesh Bhatt and Kristine Yu, will give a colloquium talk at New York University this Friday, December 7. A title and abstract follow.
An ellipsis without an antecedent: Andrews Amalgams
I will argue that the best analysis of Andrews Amalgams (as found, for example, in "She ate you'll never believe how many apples") involves an unorthodox outcome from the linearization procedure, as in Guimaräes's 2004 UMaryland dissertation. That outcome arises in part by virtue of the licensing condition on ellipsis that determines where sluices can be. This means that the condition which licenses ellipsis is not something that also enforces the condition that the ellipsis must have an antecedent. We must find a way of explaining why these things are normally paired which is less deterministic than Jason Merchant's well-known proposal.
