Not Voice but Case Identity in VP Ellipsis of English

Not Voice but Case Identity in VP Ellipsis of English Myung-Kwan Park Sunjoo Choi Department of English Department of English College of Humanities College of Humanities Dongguk University Seoul, Korea Dongguk University Seoul, Korea parkmk@dgu.edu Sunjoo3008@gmail.com Abstract This paper develops a Case/case-theoretic acco unt for what Merchant (2008) calls voice mism atch in ellipsis constructions of English. Merch ant (ibid.) reports that VP ellipsis as an elision o f smaller size VP allows voice mismatch, but Ps eudogapping and Sluicing as an elision of bigge r size vP/TP do not. However, Tanaka (2011) ar gues against Merchant's dichotomy in voice mis match between VP ellipsis and Pseudogapping, reporting that voice mismatch in both types of e llipsis is permissible or not while interacting wi th what Kehler (2000) calls discourse coherence relations between ellipsis and antecedent clause s. Departing from Kehler's (2000) insight, we s uggest that vP undergoes ellipsis in a resemblan ce discourse relation, but VP does so in a cause/ effect discourse relation. Given the asymmetry i n the size of ellipsis in tandem with discourse re lations, we argue that since Accusative as well as Nominative Case is checked outside VP, the VP to be elided can meet the identity condition on ellipsis with its antecedent VP as the object element in the former and the subject one in the latter or vice versus have not been Case-checke d yet, thus being identical in terms of Case-feat ure at the point of derivation building a VP. 1 Introduction According to Merchant (2008), VP ellipsis (VPE) in English allows mismatch between the voice of an elided constituent and that of its antecedent, whereas Sluicing and Pseudogapping do not. This holds for either direction of voice alternation between an elided constituent and its antecedent. This is illustrated in (1) through (3) ((1) and (3), taken from Merchant (2008: 169-170); (2), taken from Merchant (2013: 81)). (1) Active antecedent, passive ellipsis (VPE) a. The janitor must <remove the trash1> whenever it is apparent that [it]1 should be [VP removed t1]. Passive antecedent, active ellipsis (VPE) b. [The system] 1 can be <used t1> by anyone who wants to [VP use it1]. (2) Sluicing (TPE) *<Joe was murdered t>, but we don’t know [who] 1 [TP t1 murdered Joe]. (3) Pseudogapping *Roses were brought by some, and others did bring lilies. This paper examines the very issue of voice mismatch in the above three types of ellipsis in English. The next section reviews Merchant's (2007, 2008) analysis of voice mismatch in ellipsis by postulating the functional category of Voice in the syntactic structure of a clause, and the subsequent rebuttal of Merchant's analysis by Tanaka (2011). Departing from the empirical generalization made by Tanaka, section 3 proposes a not Voice- but Case/case-theoretic account for apparent voice mismatch in VP ellipsis and PACLIC 29 413 29th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 413 - 421 Shanghai, China, October 30 - November 1, 2015 Copyright 2015 by Myungkwan Park …

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