A current major focus of my research involves joint work with Dr. Amber Stubbs of the Simmons University to create The English VP Ellipsis Corpus: a first-of-its kind dataset of roughly 7,000 examples of the English VP (Verb Phrase) VP Ellipsis construction, each including substantial portions of surrounding discourse context, along with basic discourse and detailed morphosyntactic annotation.
My McGill University dissertation, titled Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis: A Cross-Linguistic Study, was completed and successfully defended in June 2005. My advisors were Lisa deMena Travis of McGill, and Jason Merchant of the University of Chicago as an external co-advisor.
The dissertation had two goals.
The first is the development of a set of diagnostics by which the VP Ellipsis ("VPE") construction can be identified—irrespective of whether the main V involved is null or overt. It is proposed that these diagnostics can be used to rule out the possibility that the data at issue are cases of other types of null anaphora, such as null arguments, Stripping, Gapping, and Null Complement Anaphora. It emerges from this section of the thesis that Modern Hebrew, Modern Irish, and Swahili have V-Stranding VPE data which form a natural class with English's Aux-Stranding VPE, while Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish do not.
The second goal is to address the question of how V-Stranding VPE should be generated. The dissertation argues in favor of an analysis involving PF Deletion of a VP out of which the main V has raised, and against an LF Copying treatment. These arguments, in part, involve the Verbal Identity Requirement on VP Ellipsis—a novel generalization involving strict identity in root and derivational morphology between the antecedent- and target- clause main Vs of the construction. Within the previously known requirement that elided phrases express semantically Given information, I argue that this generalization results from the fact that the head of an elided phrase must itself express Given information—whether or not the head surfaces as phonologically null.
Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Establishing a Diagnosis of V-Stranding VP Ellipsis
Chapter 3: Deriving the Verb Stranding Effect
Chapter 4: Capturing the Isomorphism Requirements of V-Stranding VPE
Chapter 5: Conclusion
You can download the thesis here:
First half: Abstracts, TOC, Acknowledgements, and Chapters 1 and 2
Second half: Chapters 3-5 and References