When a complement PP goes missing: a study on the licensing of Swiping

Overview One of the mysterious properties of the so-called Swiping construction ([1,2,3]) is that adjunct PPs, but not complement PPs, can license Swiping ([1]). Contrary to this observation, we show that complement PPs can, in fact, license swiping, but only when they have undergone Heavy Shift (HS). Based on this novel observation, we make the following two claims. First, following [4,5,6], we claim that there are two types of movement, one leaving a copy behind and the other not. We will show that HS falls into the second class. Second, Gapping and Pseudo-gapping (PG) are necessarily derived by " unreconstructing " movement: HS for Gapping ([7,8,9]; cf. [10,11]) and A-movement for PG ([12]). Observation [1] shows that Swiping is licensed with no antecedent PP ((1a)) or an adjunct PP antecedent ((1b)), but not with a complement PP antecedent ((1c)). One prominent account of this paradigm is that Swiping is licensed when the PP is not " given " in the antecedent of IP-deletion ([2], based on " Avoid F " in (2) by [13]). According to [2], a VP that excludes the adjunct PP, which is a full proposition under the VP-internal subject hypothesis ([14,15,16]), can serve as an antecedent for IP-deletion. As a result, adjunct PPs are not " given " in the VP ((3)). On the other hand, complement PPs are necessarily dominated by the innermost VP and must be " given " in the VP. Thus, [2] concludes that complement PPs do not license Swiping. There are, however, cases where complement PPs license Swiping; according to our informants, Swiping with a complement PP is acceptable when it is heavy shifted ((4b)). As far as we know, such data has never been reported. This suggests that HS somehow makes the complement PP " not given " in the VP. Additionally, Swiping is also licensed by a complement PP that is a Gapping/PG remnant ((5b,c)), which indicates that Gapping /PG also makes complement PPs " not given ". This parallelism between HS and Gapping/PG suggests that, in both cases, complement PPs are excluded from the VP that licenses IP-deletion in Swiping. The fact that in-situ complement PPs do not license Swiping indicates that only an overt operation can make the complement PP " not given " and that there is no string-vacuous HS. Analysis First, the asymmetry between in-situ and heavy shifted PPs is accounted for by the so-called …