Vehicle change and reconstruction in Ā-chains

Ken Safir

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

81 Scopus citations

Abstract

Fiengo and May (1994) argue that what they call "vehicle change," which permits copies of names to be evaluated as pronouns with respect to interpretive principles, plays a key role in accounting for reconstruction effects in ellipsis environments. It is argued here that the alleviation of Principle C violations ("antireconstruction effects"), where it occurs in Ā-chains, is due not to deletion of the lower copy, as in Chomsky 1995, but to vehicle change. The introduction of vehicle change into the theory of Ā-chains is independently motivated as essential to capturing a robust adjunct/nonadjunct distinction in the reconstruction of pronoun-as-bound-variable readings that has not been discussed up to now; at the same time it predicts the class of "weakest crossover" environments.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)587-620
Number of pages34
JournalLinguistic Inquiry
Volume30
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1999

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

Keywords

  • Crossover
  • Reconstruction
  • Resumption
  • Vehicle change

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