English verbal morphology and VP ellipsis

1his paper investigates the influences of verbal morphology on the (im)possibility of VP ellipsis (VPE) in English. VPE is a well-known process in which a VP constituent is missing under some kind of identity with another VP in the discourse. (1) illustrates. There is an overt VP, the antecedent, which substitutes interpretationally for an inaudible VP elsewhere, the target. Typically below, the antecedent will be bracketed and the elided VP will be explicitly indicated by striking through the unpronounced material. For concreteness, I take VPE to be deletion of a VP at PF (Hankamer and Sag 1976, Sag 1980, Chomsky 1995, and others), although nothing hinges on this assumption since parallel issues arise in a theory ofVPE as LF copying (Wasow 1972, Williams 1977, Chao 1988). (I) a. Joe will [ VP taste the food] if Mikey does taste the feee. b. Elvis has been sighted at Disneyland! So, what famous celebrity hasn ' t been sightea at DisneylaHe? c. Matt is moving to Finland and Sophie might also be mevinl!! te Finlana. There are numerous restrictions on VP ellipsis in English concerning the structural position of the elided VP and the kind of identity that must hold between the antecedent and target VPs. This paper investigates a particular aspect of the identity- namely, to what extent morphological differences are permitted between the verb forms in the two VPs. To illustrate, in contrast to the grammatical examples in ( 1) which show full morphological identity, there are examples of VPE, in (2), in which there is imperfect morphological identity and the results are robustly ungrammatical. (2) a. *I am confused about ellipsis and you will be eenfusee abeHl elliflsis too. b. *Chris has been to Rome and his wife might have been te Reme as well. I would like td thank Judith Aissen, Jim McCloskey, Jason Merchan ~ Geoff Pullum and audiences a