LLS Colloquium: On Vehicle Change and Ellipsis Identity

On Wednesday 18th May 2022, Klaus Abels (UCL) will be presenting on "vehicle change and ellipsis identity".

Talk: On Vehicle Change and Ellipsis Identity

Vehicle change is the process whereby one type of DP in the antecedent to an elliptical utterance can be treated as a member of a different class under ellipsis. For example, R-expressions are subject to binding principle C but pronouns are not. This accounts for the fact that `he’ and `John’ can be coreferent in example (1) with VP-ellipsis and in the non-elliptical (2) with a pronoun in place of `John’ but not in (3): 

1. Mary loves John and he thinks that Sally does, too. 
2. Mary loves John and he thinks that Sally loves him, too. 
3. Mary loves John and he thinks that Sally loves John, too. 

While Fiengo and May argue that vehicle change is a fully symmetrical relation between different types of DPs (R-expressions, pronouns, anaphors) and each type can, under the right circumstances, stand in for the others, many researchers have suggested that vehicle change is restricted to replacement by a pronoun. Oku, in particular, argues that this asymmetric retreat to the pronoun under vehicle change is an effect of recoverability of elided material. The present talk will address this debate by filling a gap in Fiengo and May’s ellipsis paradigm, which, curiously, appears not to have been noted in the literature. In particular, I will show that even in cases in which Fiengo and May would most expect pronouns to undergo vehicle change to anaphors, they do not. In other words, I argue that a retreat to the pronominal form under ellipsis is the most adequate description of the data. 

I will then show how the assumption that there is syntactic structure at the ellipsis site - together with suitable assumptions about the structure of R-expressions, anaphors, and pronouns - can derive the facts. Vehicle change thus furnishes an indirect argument for the assumption that there is syntactic structure at the ellipsis site. 

The talk will take place at 4pm on Zoom, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. Please sign up to receive a zoom invite at this link.

Event poster: LLS Colloquium: On Vehicle Change and Ellipsis Identity