Verbal mismatch in Right-Node Raising

Abstract

Right-Node Raising (RNR, Ross 1967; Chaves 2014) has been claimed to require phonological identity between the missing material and the shared element. Our corpus investigations provide examples of RNR with verb form mismatch with and without syncretism in English and French. Two acceptability experiments show that lack of phonological identity does not affect the acceptability of RNR. We argue further that RNR without phonological identity cannot be taken to be a case of cataphoric VP-ellipsis in French and that it should not be analyzed as such in English. As regards the status of RNR with verb form mismatch, two positions are available: either it is considered to be grammatical, in which case the phonological resolution principle of Pullum & Zwicky (1986) does not hold, or it is considered to be ungrammatical but repaired (or " recycled", Arregui et al. 2006; Frazier 2013). The high acceptability of cases with mismatch compared with ungrammatical controls casts doubt on the applicability of the recycling hypothesis in such cases. In order to account for the broader range of data established by our corpus and experimental results, we propose a new analysis of RNR based on lexeme identity rather than form identity.

Voice mismatch and contrast in French Right-Node Raising

“…Following Chaves (2014), Shiraishi et al (2019), we show how an HPSG analysis can account for our data.…”

“…In this paper, we focus on voice mismatch in RNR (Ross 1967, Chaves 2014) for French, which has been shown to accept some syntactic mismatches (Shiraishi et al 2019).…”

“…Chaves (2014) proposes that the missing and peripheral strings must have the same morphophonology and that the latter must be prosodically independent. Shiraishi et al (2019) propose a revised deletion analysis based on lexeme identity instead of morphosyntactic identity, in order to capture polarity, preposition, and verb form mismatch. Verb form mismatch has been observed by Shiraishi et al (2019) (Example (11a)) as well as polarity (Example (11b)) (Kayne 1994) or preposition mismatches (Example (11c)) (Abeillé et al 2016 (www.cemea.asso.fr, 1997) In Examples ( 14) and (15), the missing past participle in the first conjunct corresponds to the passive participle in the second conjunct.…”

“…the apple to-her be.FUT given "the apple will be given to her" 5.3. An HPSG analysis for RNR Following Shiraishi et al (2019), we assume that RNR does not require phonological identity (Example (11a)) but lexeme identity (unless pun or zeugma). The following example is unfelicitous because it involves two different homophonous lexemes: the baseball bat (elided) and the animal bat (peripheral):…”

What Divides, and What Unites, Right-Node Raising

“…The first property familiar from forward ellipsis is that RNR tolerates morphological mismatches between the overt and the missing material (see also Bošković 2004, Ha 2008and Shiraïshi et al 2019). One such mismatch involves the inflectional form of selected verbs.…”