The Status of Remnant Complements in
Pseudogapping
Philip Miller — Université Paris Diderot, EA 3967 Clillac-Arp
[email protected]
Introduction
Pseudogapping (PG), illustrated in (1-a)-(1-b), is a construction similar to Verb Phrase Ellipsis
(VPE), illustrated in (2), in that it involves ellipsis of a verb after an auxiliary. However in VPE
the entire XP complement of the Aux is ellipted, whereas in PG the auxiliary is followed by an
XP, called the ‘remnant’ (me, in (1-a), which is interpreted as the complement of the ellipted
verb bother).1
(1)
a.
b.
me,” he growled,
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said untruthfully. “Well, it does bother :::
and I let it rest. (Fic)
Clarified butter may be stored in refrigerator until needed. Melt it as you would
regular
butter when ready to use. (Mag)
:::::::::::::
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said untruthfully. “Yes, it does bother you.
(2)
PG was first discussed by Stump 1977. Levin 1986 provides a detailed description and a classical TG analysis based on a collection of naturally occurring examples. Miller 2014 extends
Levin’s data on the basis of over 1500 occurrences of PG found in the COCA corpus.
Two central analyses of PG have been available since 1990, both of which agree on the idea
that PG is a variant of VPE. One is a transformational analysis, initially proposed by Jayaseelan
1990 and further developed by Lasnik 1999 and Gengel 2013. Under this analysis, known as
‘remnant raising’, the remnant is raised out of the VP feeding VPE, as sketched in (3):
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said untruthfully. “Well, it does [VP bother ti ] mei ,”
(3)
The other is a phrase structure analysis, proposed by Miller 1990 (couched in the GPSG framework of Gazdar et al. 1985), which was further built on by Hoeksema 2006 and Kubota and
Levine 2014, 2017. Under this analysis, following the proposals of Schachter 1978 for VPE,
the auxiliary is assumed to be anaphoric (see also Hardt 1993, who proposes a similar analysis except that the auxiliary is assumed to be followed by a empty VP pro-form). In order to
analyze PG, Miller suggests that the auxiliaries can subcategorize any kind of complement and
that the meaning of the missing verb is recovered by an anaphoric mechanism:
(4)
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said untruthfully. “Well, it does me,”
does: SUBCAT[—NP]
The purpose of this paper is (i) to briefly review the detailed corpus evidence provided by
Miller 2014 arguing against the remnant raising approach; (ii) to provide experimental evidence against the remnant raising approach; (iii) to show that the phrase structure approach of
1
VPE is a misnomer (as pointed out by Sag 1976, p.53, who suggested the term ‘Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis’),
since the ellipted constituent can be any phrase subcategorized by an auxiliary. With auxiliary be, in particular,
it can be an AP, NP or PP. Note that in examples I underline the antecedent, double underline the pre-elliptical
auxiliary and wavy underline the remnant. In some cases, in order to clarify interpretation, the putatively ellipted
material is struck out. Note that most examples are taken from the COCA corpus (Davies 2008-), and are marked
as such by indicating the register from which they are taken (Acad(emic), News(paper), Mag(azine), Fic(tion) and
Spok(en). Examples without a register indications are manipulations of attested examples.)
1
Miller 1990 can easily account for these data; (iv) to compare the phrase structure analysis with
the recent analysis proposed using Hubrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar by Kubota and
Levine 2017; and (v) to suggest some further refinements.
1
Corpus evidence against the remnant raising approaches
I will concentrate on the recent and detailed study of Gengel 2013 (See Gengel and Miller 2014
for discussion of previous remnant raising approaches). She proposes that the remnant is raised
by Focus movement, (A-bar-movement) and that this feeds deletion under identity of the VP
without the remnant. This makes the following predictions. (i) Remnant movement must obey
constraints on A-bar-movement, in particular island constraints; (ii) Remnant movement should
respect connectivity: the form of the remnant must be the form expected in the nonelliptical
variant; (iii) There must be an appropriate antecedent in the discourse context.
Miller (2014) provides detailed evidence against these three predictions on the basis of a
study of PG in the COCA corpus (1200 examples of PG with an NP remnant and 300 of PG
with a PP remnant). Of particular interest here is the fact that putative remnant movement does
not appear to respect island constraints. Naturally occurring examples of island violations are
provided in (5) and (6). Each example is followed by a variant in b. which show that usual
A-bar-movement of the remnant are impossible or at least much less acceptable than PG.
(5)
According to current ideas, the frothiness of space retards the arrival of a burst’s
highest-energy photons more than it does :::
the::::::::::::::
lowest-energy::::::::
photons. (Mag) [CNPC]
b. ?*The photons which it retards the arrival of.
(6)
Bring the same kind of carry-ons (diapers, medications, toys, etc.) when traveling
by train as you would by
air; you’re allowed two per person. (Mag) [Adjunct
::::::
island]
b. *a means of transport which I brought the same kinds of carry-ons when traveling
by.
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a.
a.
Evidence against remnant raising from an acceptability
experiment
The purpose of the experiment is to compare the effects on acceptability of CNPC violations in
PG and in wh- movement. Relative clauses were chosen to exemplify wh-movement because it
is known that they are the wh-movement construction whose acceptability is least affected by
island violations. If PG and relative clauses are both derived by A-bar movement, one would
expect them to show similar evidence of island violation on acceptability when their derivations
involve CNPC violations. I thus used experimental items involving two factors:
— Factor 1: PG vs. Rel (Pseudogapping vs. Relative clause)
— Factor 2: +CNPC vs. –CNPC (Presence vs. absence of a CNPC violation)
A typical item in its four conditions is presented in (7) (these are annotated to reflect the
transformational hypotheses; these annotations were obviously not present in the actual materials presented to the subjects):
(7)
a.
b.
[PG,–CNPC] We tried more shirts than we did pantsi [VP try ti ]
[PG,+CNPC] We tried more brands of shirts than we did pantsi [VP try [NP brands
2
c.
d.
of ti ]]
[Rel,–CNPC] I didn’t like the items øi that [we tried ti ]
[Rel,+CNPC] I didn’t like the items øi that [we tried [NP the most brands of ti ]]
20 items of this type were constructed. The experiment was set up on the Ibex platform. Items
were distributed across 4 lists following a Latin Square design, randomly mixed with 44 distractors. The Amazon Mechanical Turk platform was used to find 100 participants who judged
acceptability (explained in terms of naturalness and of being something that a native speake
of English might say) on a 7 point scale. 2 self-reported non-native speakers of English were
excluded. Figure 1 provides a typical stimulus and Figure 2 provides the results.
Figure 1: A typical stimulus
7
Mean judgment scores with CI for each condition
6
Judgment score
5
4
3
2
1
e2_PG_unCNPC
e2_PG_withCNPC
e2_Rel_unCNPC
Condition
e2_Rel_withCNPC
Figure 2: Acceptability of PG vs. relatives without and with CNPC violations
As shown in Figure 2, there was no significant difference between (i) PG without CNPC violations (1st column); (ii) PG with CNPC violations (2nd column); and (iii) Relative clauses
without CNPC violations (3rd column). On the other hand, Relative clauses with CNPC violations were judged significantly less acceptable.
Proponents of remnant-raising could suggest that the difference between PG and RCs is that
deletion absolves island violations (as suggested Ross 1967 for sluicing). However this analysis
is usually rejected today as it actually provides an argument against unpronounced structure.
3
Another possible defense, following Frazier and her colleagues (e.g. Frazier 2013), would be to
claim that such cases are ungrammatical but repairable, and that their acceptability depends on
the complexity of the repair. But this is difficult to maintain if the cases claimed to be ungrammatical show no difference in acceptability with those claimed to be grammatical, as is the case
here. To contrast with the voice-mismatch VPE cases studied in Grant et al. 2012, they get an
average judgment of 2.95 for matched active-active VPE cases and 1.94 for mismatch passiveactive cases (with an NAI implicature), on a scale of 1 (=unacceptable) to 5 (highly acceptable)
(p.330), which lends some plausibility to the idea that they are repaired. Furthermore, there
is a statistically significant difference in frequency between voice mismatches with VPE and
island violations with PG, which are much more frequently attested in corpora. Under these
conditions it seems that the burden of proof is on those who would claim that the cases of PG
with island violation are fully acceptable but ungrammatical.
3
An HPSG analysis of Pseudogapping
Adapting the analysis of Miller 1990 to current HPSG, I modify the type hierarchy so that
the type dervv-lxm of elliptical auxiliaries (produced by the Ellipsis LR of Sag et al. (2003),
p.508) can inherit the ARG-ST of siv-lxm, piv-lxm, tv-lxm etc. through multiple-inheritance.
This gives rise to trees like (8) with an NP or PP[to] remnant.
(8)
"
#
S SPR
hi
COMPS hi
"
#
VP SPR
h1i
COMPS hi
NP
1
It

V[aux] SPR

COMPS
ARG-ST

h1i

h3i

h 1 , 2 VP[pro,base, 3 ]i
3
NP/PP
me/to me
does
This means that, as in Miller 1990, the grammar will strongly overgenerate, since it will not
restrict the complements of the auxiliary so that they match those of the antecedent, as in (9):
(9)
“It doesn’t bother me,” I said untruthfully. “#Well, it does bother to
me.”
:::::
Following Miller (1990) I assume that such sentences are grammatical but incoherent in the
discourse, similarly to the position taken on mismatched sluicing by Ginzburg and Sag 2000;
Ginzburg 2012. Miller based his proposal on the acceptability of examples like the following:
(10)
a.
b.
Ask Doll, who spoke as much about his schoolboy career ending as he did of
the
:::::
season
in general: “I don’t want it to end.” (News) [compare: he spoke of the
:::::::::::::::::
season in general]
Ask Doll, who spoke as much about his schoolboy career ending as #he did ::
to:::
the
public
in
general:
“I
don’t
want
it
to
end.”
::::::::::::::::
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He suggested that examples like (10-a) with mismatch are acceptable because the PP[of] has
the same semantic role as the PP[about] in the antecedent with respect to the verb. When
this is not the case, as in (10-b), the mismatch leads to unacceptability. Clearly the remnant
movement analysis is incapable of making the appropriate distinctions between (10-a) and
(10-b), as pointed out by Miller 2014.
I compare Miller’s original approach with that of Kubota and Levine 2017 and propose that
a more principled analysis can be obtained using the notion of ‘Focus Establish Constituent’ of
Ginzburg 2012, which allows one to keep track of strictly limited syntactic information (limited
to properties of the discourse-salient constituent) in the discourse model.
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