Colloquium: Lisa Cheng

On Tuesday, November 5th at 4:30 pm at the Seminarhaus (SH) 0.107, Lisa Cheng (Leiden University) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium.

Title: Verb-stranding Ellipsis: evidence from Cantonese

Abstract:
Landau (2018) argues that object gaps in Hebrew are not results of Verb-stranding VP Ellip- sis. He further suggests that X-stranding XP-ellipsis is very limited cross-linguistically. In this talk, I examine data from Cantonese, putting forth new arguments for Verb-stranding ellipsis, and discussing what it means for Landau’s theory. I consider both VP ellipsis and verbal echo answers. After establishing that there is verb-stranding ellipsis in Cantonese, I discuss how verb-stranding ellipsis can be realized if the verb does not move out of the verb phrase. In the case of verbal echo answers, I consider how big the ellipsis site has to be, and what it means concerning movement of the verb.