A New Argument for Verb-Stranding Verb Phrase Ellipsis

In Gribanova, to appear, I develop an analysis of Russian constructions like (1), in which the verb moves to an Asp head just below T, in conjunction with the ellipsis of a vP-sized constituent (verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis, or VVPE); a general schema is provided in (2).

1. 1.

   1. A. Èto daže esli ja vody      v rot    naberu?
      that even if   I  water.GEN in mouth collect.1SG.FUT
      'Is that even if I fill my mouth with water?'
      (Idiomatically: 'Is that even if I keep silent?')

   2. B. Daže esli i    naberëte. Da ved' ne   naberëte,
      even if   and collect   yes but   NEG collect
      ne   naberëte že!
      NEG collect   EMPH
      'Even if you fill (it with water). But you won't fill (it with water), you won't fill (it with water)!'
      (Idiomatically: 'Even if you keep silent! But you won't, you won't!')
      

(Ju. O. Dombrovskij, Fakul'tet nenužnyx veščej, part 2, 1978)

1. 2.

This analysis provides a natural testing ground for several difficult issues in Russian syntax, one of which is clausal structure. Using VVPE to probe this issue is especially promising for Russian, which makes use of complex verbal forms that are also potentially syntactically complex, but inseparable. In Gribanova, to appear, I follow explorations of Irish (McCloskey 2011) and Hebrew (Goldberg 2005a,b) in leveraging data from VVPE to shed light on this complexity: identity conditions on the stranded verb in VVPE can be understood to indicate which parts of the verbal complex originate inside the ellipsis site, and which parts originate outside the ellipsis site (i.e., above vP).

This proposal is controversial largely because Russian, like Hebrew, is also an object drop language, which means that examples like (1) may also be successfully analyzed as instances of object drop (and perhaps PP drop). In Gribanova, to appear, I maintain that both operations—VVPE and object drop—are active in Russian and that they can be distinguished by probing the syntactic environments in which they appear: object drop is restricted inside islands, as demonstrated by the degraded nature of object drop inside islands when there is no linguistic antecedent; VVPE, like most forms of constituent ellipsis, is permitted inside islands, as long as a linguistic antecedent is available.

Opponents of this approach (see Bailyn 2011, Erteschik-Shir, Ibn-Bari, and Taube 2011, 2012) correctly point out that judgments of such contrasts are gradient, subject to pragmatic effects, and difficult to obtain. In part, this is because the syntactic conditions under which the claimed contrast between object drop and VVPE is supposed to emerge are already quite complex. Bailyn's (2011) and Erteschik-Shir, Ibn-Bari, and Taube's (2011, 2012) proposals differ: the former takes (1) to be an instance of NP/PP-ellipsis—surface anaphora, requiring a linguistic antecedent—and the latter claims that argument drop (deep anaphora) is involved. But both proposals take the position that VVPE is not possible in Russian.

In this squib, I present novel evidence from negation and disjunction—involving much less gradient judgments—in favor of the hypothesis that VVPE is involved in Russian (section 1). The hope is that this diagnostic will be effective for other languages in which there is debate about how to analyze such constructions (i.e., Hebrew, as well as the East Asian languages: see Saito 1985, Otani and Whitman 1991, Hoji 1998, Kim 1999). One of the interesting points made by Bailyn (2011) is that if these constructions are instances of VVPE, then they behave differently from other types of ellipsis in Russian. In section 2, I build on this discussion and contextualize it in light of the different kinds of ellipsis found in Russian and the new evidence from section 1.

1 Conjunction, Disjunction, and Negation

The reason such a complex diagnostic is used to distinguish VVPE from argument drop in Gribanova, to appear, is that many of the tests typically used to distinguish the two are either ineffective for Russian or have been shown to be faulty in other languages. For example, the...