The syntax workshop meets on Thursdays at 10AM in ILC N451. This Thursday, April 2, Nick will narrowly miss giving an April Fool’s presentation of his paper “Ellipsis is not Spell-Out: What Scandinavia tells us about ellipsis and phrases.”
Abstract
This paper investigates two contemporary theories of ellipsis licensing from the perspective of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Scandinavian languages exhibit verb movement in main clauses in the form of verb-second order, but contrary to the predictions of Goldberg (2005) they do not show verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis in VPE contexts. I argue that phase-based approaches to ellipsis (Gengel 2007, Holmberg 2001, Rouveret 2012, a.o.) cannot adequately capture this fact. Instead, following Sailor (2014), I argue in favor of Aelbrecht’s (2010) derivational approach to ellipsis, which captures the facts in Scandinavian languages straightforwardly.
