Search

Copyright of Taiwan Journal of Linguistics is the property of Graduate Institute of Linguistics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Previous scholarship offers two different analyses of the variable acceptability of VP ellipsis. According to one of them (pioneered by Lobeck 1995), an ellipsis site must be licensed by a governing head, so that it should appear in an environment with an appropriate licensor; in the other one (advocated in Johnson 2001), the possibility of VP ellipsis is linked to the possibility of VP topicalization. This paper focuses on the impossibility of VP ellipsis in examples featuring locative inversion and shows that such unnoticed VPE patterns are compatible only with the latter VP topicalization approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the placement restrictions on the number of arguments inside the verbal domain. The empirical basis consists of subject inversion cases where overt subject or object movement is not required for EPP-related reasons. Specifically, we look at a variety of inversion constructions where either the subject or the object with uninterpretable Case features must vacate the vP. I will show that the necessity of such argument externalization is a natural consequence of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2000, 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]