A cross-linguistic look at VP-ellipsis and verbal speech errors

This paper argues that consideration of spontaneous speech errors provides insight into cross-linguistic analyses of syntactic phenomena. In particular, I claim that differences in the distribution of non-parallel VP-Ellipsis constructions in English and German, as well as variation in the spontaneously-occurring verbal speech errors, is explained by a parametric analysis of variation in the inflectional systems of the two languages. 1. A Hybrid Theory of Inflection Lasnik (1995) argues for a parametric analysis of verbal inflection according to which a language may exhibit (i) a unitary system, where main and auxiliary verbs come either pre-inflected in the lexicon, or are derivationally constructed out of syntactically separate stem and affix, or (ii) a hybrid system, where main and auxiliary verbs are derived differently.