Antecedent-contained deletion

Antecedent-contained deletion (= antecedent-contained ellipsis) is a phenomenon found in contexts containing verb phrase ellipsis and a quantifier. The ellipsis appears to be contained inside its antecedent, which should result in an infinite regress and thus ungrammaticality. The problem arises in phrase structure grammars that see the constituent as the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis.^[1] It does not arise if the catena is taken to be the fundamental unit.^[2] The catena is associated with dependency grammars.^[3]

The problem in phrase structure grammars

To understand the issue involved, it is necessary to understand how VP-ellipsis works. Consider the following examples, where the expected, but elided, VP is represented with a smaller font and subscripts and the antecedent to the ellipsis is in bold:

John washed the dishes, and Mary did _{wash the dishes}, too.

John washed the dishes on Tuesday, and Mary did _{wash the dishes on Tuesday}, too.

In both of these sentences, the VP has been elided in the second half of the sentence. In both cases, the elided VP must be identical to the antecedent in the first clause. That is, the missing predicate in the first sentence can only mean wash the dishes, and in the second sentence, the missing predicate can only mean wash the dishes on Tuesday. Assuming that the missing VP must be identical to an antecedent VP leads to a problem, first noticed by Bouton (1970):

John read every book Mary did _{read every book Mary read every book Mary read every book etc.}.

Since the elided VP must be identical to its antecedent and assuming that the antecedent is a full VP, an infinite regress occurs, as indicated by the subscripted material, which would continue to repeat itself ad infinitum. That is, if we substitute in the antecedent VP into the position of the ellipsis, we must repeat the substitution process ad infinitum.

To avoid this problem, Sag (1976) proposed that the NP every book that Mary did undergoes quantifier raising (QR) to a position above the verb.

[every book that Mary did...]_i John read t_i.

Now the reference for the elided VP is simply the following:

read t_i

The analysis can now assume that the elided VP in the example corresponds to just read, since after QR, the antecedent VP no longer contains the object raised NP. The result is the following analysis:

[every book that Mary did _read] John read.

The infinite regress is now avoided because after QR, the antecedent VP contains just the verb read.

The catena analysis

An analysis of VP-ellipsis that takes the catena to be the fundamental unit of syntax (as opposed to the constituent) is not confronted with the antecedent-containment problem. The ellipsis can correspond to a non-constituent catena, which means a QR-type analysis is not needed. The catena is a concrete unit of syntactic analysis associated with dependency grammars;^[4] it is defined as any word or any word combination that is continuous with respect to dominance. The subscripted material in the examples above all qualify as catenae. The point is illustrated further with the following examples:

Bill tried to read every book that Sam did _{try to read}.

Larry has now told me to read every book that he did _tell you _{to read}.

They should ask me to do everything that they have _asked you _{to do}.

Both the elided material and the antecedent to the elided material qualify as catenae. The need for a QR or any other movement-type analysis is not needed. One can note that the second two of these three examples are instances of pseudogapping, pseudogapping being a particular manifestation of VP-ellipsis.

Notes

References

• Ágel, V., L. Eichinger, H.-W. Eroms, P. Hellwig, H. Heringer, and H. Lobin (eds.) 2003/6. Dependency and valency: An international handbook of contemporary research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
• Baltin, M. 1987. Do antecedent-contained deletions exist? Linguistic Inquiry 18, 4, 579-595.
• Bouton, L. 1970. Antecedent-contained pro-forms. In Proceedings of Sixth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. M. Campbell Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
• Hornstein, N. 1994. An argument for Minimalism: The case of antecedent-contained deletion. Linguistic Inquiry 25, 3, 455-480.
• Kennedy, C.. 1997. Antecedent-Contained Deletion and the Syntax of Quantification. Linguistic Inquiry 28, 4, 662-688.
• May, R. 1985. Logical Form: Its structure and derivation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Osborne, T. 2005. Beyond the constituent: A DG analysis of chains. Folia Linguistica 39, 3-4, 251-297.
• Osborne, T. and Thomas Groß 2012. Constructions are catenae: Construction Grammar meets Dependency Grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 23, 1, 163-214.
• Osborne, T., M. Putnam, and T. Groß 2013. Catenae: Introducing a novel unit of syntactic analysis. Syntax 16, in press.
• Sag, I. 1976. Deletion and Logical Form. MIT dissertation.

See also

• Catena (linguistics)
• Constituent (linguistics)
• Dependency grammar
• Ellipsis (linguistics)
• Logical form (linguistics)
• Phrase structure grammar
• Verb phrase ellipsis