This monograph presents a theory of ellipsis licensing in terms of Agree and applies it to several elliptical phenomena in both English and Dutch. The author makes two main claims: The head selecting the ellipsis site is checked against the head licensing ellipsis in order for ellipsis to occur, and ellipsis – i.e., sending part of the structure to PF for non-pronunciation – occurs as soon as this checking relation is established. At that point, the ellipsis site becomes inaccessible for further syntactic operations. Consequently, this theory explains the limited extraction data displayed by ‘Dutch modals complement ellipsis’ as well as British English do: These ellipses allow subject extraction out of the ellipsis site, but not object extraction. The analysis also extends to phenomena that do not display such a restricted extraction, such as sluicing, VP ellipsis, and pseudogapping. Hence, this work is a step towards a unified analysis of ellipsis.

Based on the observation that the constraints on VP ellipsis (VPE) closely match those on VP topicalization, Johnson (2001) proposes a movement account for VPE: in order for a VP to be deleted, it first has to undergo topicalization. Our paper shows that, although attractive, making VPE dependent on VP topicalization is problematic because VPE and VP topicalization are not distributionally equivalent. While VP topicalization targets the left periphery and consequently is subjected to constraints on movement, VPE is not so restricted.The paper outlines some alternatives for capturing the observed parallelism in the licensing of VP topicalization and VPE.

The main question that this paper addresses is: what happens to nonfinite auxiliaries under English VP ellipsis (VPE)? Do they remain overt like finite auxiliaries, or do they disappear together with lexical verbs? Akmajian & Wasow (1975) and Sag (1976) observed the following pattern: nonfinite have always stays overt, being is obligatorily elided, and be and been are optionally elided. We provide an analysis for this pattern.As preliminaries for our account we follow Chomsky (1993) and Lasnik (1995b) in assuming that English auxiliaries carry uninterpretable inflectional features which force the auxiliary to raise to the relevant inflectional head for feature checking at PF.As we argue that VPE includes the progressive projections in the ellipsis site, but nothing higher, the have and being data automatically fall out: have is base-generated outside the ellipsis site, so is never elided, whilst being's landing site is inside the ellipsis site, so being is always elided. For be and been, which are base-generated in the ellipsis site and raise out of it to get their inflectional features checked, we take an optional raising approach: in non-elliptical sentences raising is obligatory, otherwise the derivation crashes at PF because of unchecked features. Ellipsis contexts, on the other hand, provide the option of not raising for be and been, because ellipsis then deletes be and been in their base positions, along with their unchecked features, avoiding the PF violation.We extend this account to other phenomena, such as VP fronting, tag questions, pseudoclefts and predicate inversion. Furthermore, we speculate that progressive aspect is in fact part of the predicate layer of the clause. This implies that the target of VPE can be characterised as the highest predicate projection of the clause, which makes VPE actually predicate ellipsis.

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This paper explores the previously undiscussed phenomenon of preposition doubling in Flemish Dutch dialects. It offers an account for the properties of this phenomenon adapting the basic internal structures for Dutch PPs proposed by Koopman (2010) and Den Dikken (2010a). They argue following Van Riemsdijk (1978, 1990) that PPs contain functional structure, parallel to the verbal and nominal domain: the lexical P is dominated by a PlaceP-parallel to vP-and also a DegP, hosting degree modifiers, and a CP[Place]. We argue that doubling PPs are the result of identical spell-out of a locative P-element (P-Loc) and a directional P-element (P-Dir), in a structure in which P-Loc has a full extended projection but P-Dir does not. The CP[Place] in the functional layer of P-Loc in doubling PPs is defective, which derives doubling as well as the distribution of R-words in these PPs. C-[Place]'s defectivity also provides a window on the cross-dialectal distribution of P-doubling: the availability of P-doubling in certain dialects is correlated with the use of the directional preposition van 'of, from' as the introducer of infinitival clauses exhibiting NP-raising