Depictives in VP Anaphora

The issue of predication enters the syntactic research through the seminal work of Halliday (1967), who draws attention to secondary predicates, which express properties of local subjects. Setting resultative predicates aside, this paper examines the structural height of depictive predicates in relation to VP anaphora such as do ellipsis and do so proverbalization. It is argued that the stranding paradox of depictives results from the adjunction height: subject depictives are adjoined to vP, and object depictives to VP. Given the light verb structure (Chomsky 1995), VP ellipsis elides the VP containing object depictives, thus stranding subject depictives, whereas vP ellipsis elides the vP containing subject depictives.