WCO, ACD, and the positions of subjects

This paper presents a brief argument from the interaction of weak crossover (WCO), antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), and other facts of VP-ellipsis that subjects are base-generated in a predicate-internal position but move through an intermediate A-position on their way to their final landing site (the specifier of TP) and can take scope in this intermediate position. The following example, from Evans 1988 (14), is a puzzle for standard accounts of VP-ellipsis and weak crossover: (1) Someone who shouldn’t have kissed each man. As Evans points out, this sentence is ambiguous, having among its possi-ble readings the one given in (2), which will be of interest here. (2) ∀x(man(x) → ∃y[person(y) ∧ kissed(y, x) ∧ shouldn′t-have-kissed(y, x)]) The important thing to note in characterizing this reading is that the deleted VP in the relative clause adjoined to the subject DP contains a variable bound by the object quantifier. It is parallel, thus, to more familiar and often discussed examples like (3a), which has a reading like that of (3b) (see Sag 1976, Dalrymple et al. 1991, Hardt 1999, among many others): (3) a. John greeted each arriving guest after Mary did. b. John greeted [each arriving guest]1 after Mary greeted him1. 1 In one influential strand of analyses of VP-ellipsis (Sag 1976, Fiengo and May 1994, Fox 2000 etc.), the reading in (2) would be generated by giving (1) the structure in (4a) (see Merchant 2001 for extensive justification that A′-traces can license the deletion of pronouns, in line with Fiengo and May 1994 and pace Safir 1998). At LF, after QR has applied to the object each man, the pronoun is bound and gives rise to the attested reading: (4) a. Someone who shouldn’t have <kissed him2> kissed each man2. b. [each man]2 [someone who shouldn’t have <kissed him2> kissed t2] The puzzle arises because the movement of each man in (4b) is expected to give rise to a WCO violation, assuming that WCO effects derive from the constraint like the one in (5) or more refined versions with an equivalen