SEMANTIC IDENTITY AND DELETION

Abstract

This paper will critically examine whether deletion is sensitive to syntactic identity conditions. Merchant (2008, 2013) recently argued that VP-Deletion, Pseudogapping, and Sluicing are all sensitive to voice mismatches. Moreover, Tanaka (2011a) argues that VP-Deletion and Sluicing are also sensitive to category mismatches. Providing several counter-examples to Merchant’s and Tanaka’s arguments, I will argue that deletion is insensitive to voice and category mismatches. I will also sketch an alternative semantic account for those mismatch phenomena. Lastly I will briefly discuss a conceptual problem Merchant’s and Tanaka’s arguments have under the Minimalist assumption that the faculty of language has no representation other than LF on which syntactic identity conditions are imposed.