Remnant licensing and structural economy in VP ellipsis

Evidence from Czech

Abstract

Remnant licensing in verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) occurs via remnant movement out of the ellipsis site or base generation outside it. The paper examines a counterexample from two types of Czech auxiliaries: higher ones in T that must be deleted in spite of being generated outside the ellipsis site, and lower ones in v/Asp that can become remnants. We assume spell-out domains determine ellipsis size (Rouveret 2012, Bošković 2014), and remnant licensing is a function of the structural position of the functional material w.r.t the phase head licensing VPE (Aelbrecht & Harwood 2015). However, we propose a new structural economy condition that blocks syntactic merger of higher syntactic CP/TP structure when a vP phase corresponds to a proposition, which is conditional on v having a tense feature with anchoring properties. In such cases, higher functional material is banned from being a remnant because it is not built in syntax, and vP alone must enter a mutual entailment relationship with an ellipsis anaphor.