The Interaction of Ellipsis and Binding: Implications for the Sequencing of Principle A

This paper argues that Principle A is not ‘an anywhere principle’, contrary to Belletti and Rizzi (1988) and much subsequent work, but must apply relatively late in derivations, perhaps at the end of each phase (Chomsky 2000). Evidence comes principally from the analysis of pseudo-gapping, in which the ellipsis remnant is extracted to a position outside of the VP which deletes. Anaphors cannot appear as ellipsis remnants when the antecedent is within the deleted material. The interaction of anaphora and ellipsis is mirrored by restrictions on scrambling of anaphors in Dutch object scrambling, and a unified analysis is proposed. The paper draws implications for other theories of constituency, such as Phillips (1996), as well as for the A-status of the ellipsis remnant, contra Jayaseelan (1999). Given that the ellipsis remnant is focused, focus cannot be explicitly represented in syntactic representations, but rather must be interpretive in nature.