Kalender Details

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Emily Manetta (University of Vermont)

Abstract

Verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), when a verb is stranded outside of the VP-sized ellipsis site in which it originated, has been identified in diverse languages (Irish, McCloskey 1991; Hebrew, Doron 1991, Goldberg 2005; Greek, Merchant 2018; Uzbek, Gribanova, to appear; i.a.), and has been invoked productively in analyses investigating the position to which verbs move and the timing of verb movement in the grammar. Recently, Landau (2018, 2019, 2020a,b) proposes a phase-based negative licensing condition on head-stranding ellipsis that precludes verb-stranding VPE altogether. He claims that apparent instances of verb-stranding VPE must be reanalyzed as generated either by Argument Ellipsis (Oku 1998; Kim 1999; Takahashi 2008), or clause-sized ellipsis that strands main verbs (Gribanova 2017). This article approaches this debate through an analysis of head movement and head-stranding ellipsis in the Indic verb-second (V2) language Kashmiri. I argue that Landau’s phase-based approach encounters empirical challenges in accounting for the presentation of ellipsis in V2 languages and requires an unworkable approach to V2 itself, at odds with a variety of accounts of V2 in Kashmiri and crosslinguistically (Holmberg 1986; Travis 1991; Vikner 1995; Zwart 1997; Bhatt 1999; Munshi and Bhatt 2009; Manetta 2011). While I argue in favor of the standard account of ellipsis (Merchant 2001, 2008), which in turn plays well with standard accounts of V2, I also affirm the important contribution of Landau’s work in identifying challenges that remain for any account of head-stranding ellipsis licensing.