Ellipsis as a diagnostic of movements in expletive there and it sentences
Danfeng Wu
December 2017 

Various proposals have been put forward as to where the English expletives "there" and "it" are initially merged in the structure. Common tools for locating contentful elements fail with expletives such as c-command conditions on anaphora, relative scope and NPI-licensing. I present evidence from ellipsis that the expletives are initially merged in vP or lower. Building on Takahashi and Fox’s (2005) proposal concerning MaxElide and Hartman’s (2011) extension of their proposal, I argue that "there" and "it" have not only undergone A-movement from a lower position to Spec, TP, but also that their traces are interpreted in the same way as A-traces of semantically contentful elements.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003772 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted
keywords:	ellipsis, expletive, there, it, vp-ellipsis, sluicing, maxelide, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [December 2017]
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