Similarities and Differences between English VP Ellipsis and VP Fronting: An HPSG Analysis

Similarities and Differences between English VP Ellipsis and VP Fronting: An HPSG Analysis

It is well-known that the English auxiliaries are sensitive to the so called NICE (Negation, Inversion, Contraction, and Ellipsis) phenomena. Based on these empirical properties of auxiliaries, this paper argues for the existence of the construction aux-head-ph whose subtypes include negation-ph, inversion-ph, vp-ellipsis-ph, vp-filler-ph, and the like. The analysis uses grammatical constructions with declarative constraints on them and posits a rich network of inheritance relations among them. I start this paper with reviewing the basic properties of English VPE (VP Ellipsis) and shows how a general argument realization constraint on English auxiliary verbs can predict VPE cases in general. It also looks into VPE in infinitive cases and shows a simple constructional constraint on the ellipsis phrase is enough to cover a wide range of complicated data including VPE in tough constructions. The latter part of the paper deals with VPF (VP fronting), providing a way of capturing the similarities and differences between VPE and VPF in a systematic, uniform way.