Analyses of the ellipsis identity condition must account for the fact that some syntactic mismatches between an 4 ellipsis site E and its antecedent A are possible while others are not. Previous accounts have suggested that the 5 relevant distinction is between different kinds of heads, such that some heads in the ellipsis site may mismatch while 6 others may not, and they have dealt with this sensitivity to a set of "special heads" with a built-for-purpose syntactic 7 identity condition which holds over and above semantic identity to constrain ellipsis. In this article I argue against 8 this approach and pursue an alternative which holds that identity is syntactic but "loose" in a precisely defined way. 9I show that the relevant generalization that accounts for syntactic identity effects in sluicing and VP-ellipsis-like 10 constructions concerns the position of variables in the antecedent, rather than the feature content of syntactic heads. 11I propose an implementation of syntactic identity which allows for the accommodation of additional antecedents, 12 with these being derived by a grammatical algorithm for generating alternatives, and I show that this implementation 13 derives the right kinds of looseness while restricting mismatches with respect to the position of variables, thus deriving 14 both the tolerable and intolerable mismatches between E and A without recourse to a specific condition regulating the 15 content of special heads. Much work on the ellipsis identity condition has revolved around the analysis of syntactic mismatches 20 between the ellipsis site E and its antecedent A. These fall into two broad categories: tolerable mismatches, 21 and intolerable mismatches. The existence of tolerable mismatches indicate that the identity condition 22 cannot be one of strict isomorphism between E and A, but rather something looser, and they have been used 23 by some (e.g. Merchant 2001, Merchant 2005, Potsdam 2007, Thoms 2013 to argue in favour of a strictly 24 semantic formulation of the identity condition, which allows the relevant differences in syntactic form. 26(1) a. I remember meeting him, but I don't remember when I met him. 27b. Decorating for the holidays is easy if you know how to decorate for the holidays. 28However, recent work (e.g. Chung 2013, Merchant 2013b, Saab to appear) has concentrated on demonstrat- 29ing the existence of intolerable mismatches: that is, mismatches between E and A which seem to cause the 30 identity condition to fail (attested by the ungrammaticality of certain construals of ellipses). The intolera-31 ble mismatches in question are of significance because they seem not to be ruled out by semantic identity 32 * For discussion and feedback I thank Matt Barros, Patrick Elliott, Anikó Liptḱ, Andrés Saab and the audience at the Leiden "identity in ellipsis" workshop, as well as four reviewers whose insightful comments improved this paper substantially. For help with data I thank Gillebrde MacMillan and all the staff and other members of the Gaelic-speaking community ...

In this paper I propose that ellipsis is licensed by overt movement. Examining variation in VP-ellipsis across English dialects, I show that movement is crucially implicated in whether or not a given element can license ellipsis. I discuss well-known restrictions on VP-ellipsis and present new data that shows that a movement-based account of these restrictions is superior to previous ones. I show that the proposed account can be extended to other cases involving A movement with empirical benefits, and I conclude by sketching the technical implementation of the theory, arguing that ellipsis is a 'repair' operation that prevents a linearization failure following non-deletion of a lower copy. I suggest that types of movement that are unable to spell out lower copies (i.e. A-movement) do not license ellipsis, thus explaining ellipsis licensing in terms of general conditions on copy deletion.

A number of works have attempted to account for the interaction between movement and ellipsis in terms of an economy condition MaxElide. We show that the elimination of MaxElide leads to an empirically superior account of these interactions. We show that a number of the core effects attributed to MaxElide can be accounted for with a parallelism condition on ellipsis. The remaining cases are then treated with a generalized economy condition that favors shorter derivations over longer ones. The resulting analysis has no need for the ellipsisspecific economy constraint MaxElide.

In this paper, we consider two kinds of vP-fronting constructions in English and argue that they receive quite different analyses. First, we show that English vP-preposing does not have the properties that would be expected of a movement-derived dependency. Evidence for this conclusion is adduced from the licensing conditions on its occurrence, from the availability of morphological mismatches, and from reconstruction facts. By contrast, we show that English participle preposing is a well-behaved case of vP-movement, contrasting with vP-preposing with respect to reconstruction properties in particular. We propose that the differences between the two constructions follow from the interaction of two constraints: the excluded middle constraint (EMC), which rules out derivations involving spellout of linearly intermediate copies only, and the N-only constraint, which restricts movement to occurring where the trace position would license a nominal. The EMC rules out deriving vP-fronting by true movement and instead necessitates a base-generation analysis, while the N-only constraint ensures that participle preposing is only possible in limited circumstances.

This article presents an analysis of a novel short answer strategy in Scottish Gaelic, called the VerbAnswer, which differs from standard fragment answers in allowing us to directly observe some of the clausal structure in which it is embedded. It is shown that the Verb-Answer is identical to the fragment answer in virtually all other respects, demanding a unified analysis, and it is demonstrated that pursuing a unified analysis is problematic for Direct Interpretation approaches to short answers, but straightforward for the Silent Structure approach of Morgan (1973) and Merchant (2004). The extended typology of short answer strategies therefore provides an argument in favour of the latter approach to elliptical phenomena.