How (not) to elide negation

This paper examines the behavior of English negative indefinites under VP-ellipsis. The main empirical observation is that negative indefinites cannot take scope out of a verbal ellip- sis site. We propose that negative indefinites involve fusion under adjacency between the clausal polarity head and an indefinite determiner, and that this adjacency comes about under multidomi- nance. Multidominance can feed the morphological coalescence of two syntactic terminals that on the surface do not appear to be linearly adjacent. The claim that there is a morphological relation between these two heads—rather than a syntactic one—is supported by the fact that it can be bled by ellipsis. Given that ellipsis is a PF-process, it can block fusion, thus preventing high scope of negative indefinites out of an ellipsis site.

Publication year:2017