LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

Syntactic Licensing of Ellipses

Lobke Albrecht
Post Doc, GIST, Ghent

How would LISSIM 6 help you in sharpening your research question and in looking for a possible answer?
1. Introduction
According to me, research benefits immensely from input from others. This input is gained both from discussions with experts, who help broaden your background on specific topics, and from conversations with linguists who are not working on the relevant topic, but whose fresh point of view can lead to new perspectives.
Linguistic summer schools offer the perfect opportunity for such discussions, during and inbetween classes. Moreover, several teachers of previous LISSIM schools (David Adger, Michal Starke, Ian Roberts) have told me about the openness and linguistic stimulation that comes especially with LISSIM schools, because of the limited number of students, informal context, and full immersion into linguistics, without many distractions.
This is why I am convinced that LISSIM would be an enormous help for my research and linguistic knowledge in general. Of course, the list of teachers at LISSIM6 in particular promises to be extremely beneficial for some specific topics I have been working on. Section 2 expands on the research questions for which LISSIM6 will hopefully get me closer to the answer.
2. Research questions and how I believe LISSIM6 can help
My PhD research revolved around the topic of ellipsis, and more specifically its syntactic licensing. If ellipsis is subject to two conditions, recoverability and syntactic licensing, the former is supposedly similar in all languages, as it involves the semantics and pragmatics of what the speaker means and how the hearer interprets an elliptical sentence. Syntactic licensing, however, is something that needs to be studied across languages, because languages differ to which kinds of ellipsis they allow and in which environments, as a result of their different syntax.
In Aelbrecht (2009, 2010) I claim that ellipsis is licensed by an Agree relation between the licensing head and an [E](llipsis) feature (see Merchant 2001 for details on [E]). More importantly, I argue that ellipsis occurs during the derivation, as soon as the licensor is merged, and not at the end. These findings are primarily based on a phenomenon which I call Modal Complement Ellipsis (MCE) in Dutch, exemplified in (1), but I have also looked at English VP ellipsis and Pseudogapping, British English do and English and Dutch sluicing.
Although I have expanded the data set somewhat with data from Romance and other Germanic languages, it is important to investigate other, preferably non-Indo-European, languages with respect to ellipsis, to know whether this theory is valid cross-linguistically. At LISSIM6, I hope to discuss these issues with Tanmoy Bhattacharya, who has worked on ellipsis, and sluicing in particular, in languages beyond my limited scope. Furthermore, a question I have been struggling with is how to perceive the [E] feature and how to restate it in less speculative terms. I have not found the answer by looking at Germanic languages, so I hope a broader data set will bring me closer to my goal, and that LISSIM6, its teachers and other students can help me with that.
(1) Ik wil je helpen, maar ik kan niet [ helpen].
I want you help but I can not help
‘I want to help you, but I can’t.’
Moreover, I discovered that MCE allows subjects to move out of the ellipsis site, but objects are not. My solution for this puzzle is that the ellipsis site is elided at PF as soon as the licensor enters the derivation, and that in MCE this means that subjects can escape, while objects have no position to move to before the licensor is merged. In my thesis I have already used Jonathan Bobaljik’s conception of overt and covert movement, and the conditions on movement are crucial in my work. Therefore I would like to discuss these ideas with him.
A puzzle with respect to MCE I have not been able to solve involves ellipsis in Antecedent-Contained Deletions (ACD) contexts. Although MCE does not allow object extraction, the ellipsis is fine in ACD contexts, see (2a), which are claimed to involve operator movement from the object position. One could argue that this is because the operator
is non-overt, but things are more complicated than that: MCE is disallowed when the subject of the embedded clause has a different referent from the matrix subject, see (2b).
(2) a. Will leest meer boeken dan hij moet [ lezen tOp].
Will reads more books than he moet read
‘Will reads more books than he has to.’
b. * Will moet meer boeken lezen dan Louis moet [ lezen tOp].
Will must more books read than Louis must read
Intended: Will has to read more books than Louis.’
I hope that Roumyana Pancheva’s expertise on comparatives and Friederike Moltmann’s semantic courses can give me new leads in this puzzle.
Pancheva will probably not only be able to teach me about comparative structures. For my research on MCE I needed to look into the structure of the verb phrase, and more specifically into how tense, aspect and modality are represented in syntax in complex clauses.
This topic also ties in immediately with MT Hany Babu’s research on modality. To know how the modal verb can license ellipsis, I need a clear view on what modals do, and also on how they behave in other languages. I hope to find more languages that allow MCE, and in particular languages that differ structurally from Germanic and Romance.
Recently, I have also been looking into doubling phenomena. More specifically, together with Marcel den Dikken I have been analysing preposition doubling in Flemish dialects, see (3).
(3) Hij klimt op den berg op.
he climbs on the hill on
‘He climbs onto the hill.’
We have determined the structure of these doubling PPs, but I would like to find out why the doubling occurs. As prepositions are linked to Case assignment, I hope that David’s Pesetsky can give me some insight in this issue. In short, there are many ways in which LISSIM6 can help me with my research in particular and my linguistic development in general, and I would be honoured to attend the school.

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