Speaker: Omri Doron (UMass Amherst) & Ido Benbaji-Elhadad (MIT)
Title: Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion
Time: , 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Jacobson (2016) observes that fragment answers to which-questions seem to have different felicity conditions than fully spelled out answers and even ones with VP ellipsis, as demonstrated in (1). Jacobson takes this fact as evidence against an analysis of Fragment Answers as the result of Clausal Ellipsis (FACE, in short; Merchant, 2005), and proposes an analysis that treats them as connected to their preceding questions via a special syntactic relation. But FACE has its merits: (i) It explains why fragments seem sensitive to constraints on movement and morphosyntactically connected to their hypothesized “original position”; and (ii) it unifies fragment answers, VP ellipsis and sluicing under the same recoverability conditions. In this talk, we propose a novel account of Jacobson’s puzzle which does not give up FACE, and instead points at the parallelism constraint on ellipsis as the source of infelicity in (1a). Specifically, assuming trace conversion (Fox, 1999), we propose that the mismatch between the trace left by which Math professor and the one left by Mary prevents them from satisfying parallelism. In doing so, we argue for a modification to the process of trace conversion.
(1) Q: Which Math professor left the party early?
a. #Mary, but she’s not a Math professor.
b. Mary left the party early, but she’s not a Math professor.
c. Mary did, but she’s not a Math professor.