More doubts on verb-stranding VP ellipsis: Reply to Simpson 2023

Advocating a verb-stranding-VP-ellipsis analysis for object-gap sentences, Andrew Simpson (“In defense of verb-stranding VP ellipsis”) argues that under negation the “adjunct reading” is missing because it depends on focal stress, which cannot be realized on unpronounced material. No such condition holds, I maintain, and the absence of the adjunct reading reflects a syntactic absence: argument-ellipsis sites contain no VP adjuncts. The adjunct reading emerges in some languages when the antecedent sentence is negative too, an inexplicable contingency for the verb-stranding-VP-ellipsis analysis; in fact, these constructions involve polarity ellipsis (of TP), in which VP adjuncts are included. However, this derivation is not available to all languages, explaining some crosslinguistic differences in adjunct readings under negation. Finally, an optional adjunct reading may emerge in affirmative object-gap sentences due to pragmatic enrichment, a process sensitive to context in ways that go beyond the predictions of the syntactic analysis advocated by Simpson.