Derivational Parallelism and Ellipsis Parallelism

A central topic in work on ellipsis is the parallelism between missing VPs and their antecedents. There is evidence that parallelism is conditioned both syntactically and semantically. This has resulted in complex hybrid principles that regulate both syntactic structures and their interpretations (e.g., Fox 1995, 2000). We present an alternative, unified account based on parallelism of semantic derivations (i.e., proofs) in Glue Semantics (Dalrymple 1999, 2001). Our proposal captures the insights of hybrid accounts, but is conceptually simpler and empirically superior. It is also theoretically important, as it constitutes an implicit argument for a level of semantic representation, favoring indirect translation (Montague 1973) over direct model-theoretic interpretation (Montague 1970). The empirical focus of the paper is scope parallelism in ellipsis in general (Sag 1976, Williams 1977), and the problem of “Canadian flag” sentences in particular (Hirschbühler 1982). Sag (1976) noticed that a scopally ambiguous sentence seems to be disambiguated to surface scope when it is the source sentence for VP-ellipsis, as in (1).