1999/10/01 by Ken Safir · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.1162/002438999554228
crossref issued 1999/10/01 · crossref published 1999/10/01 · crossref published-print 1999/10/01 · openalex publication_date 1999/10/01 · crossref created 2002/07/27 · crossref deposited 2021/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/28 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29
Fiengo and May (1994) argue that what they call “vehicle change,” which permits copies of names to be evaluated as pronouns with respect to interpretive principles, plays a key role in accounting for reconstruction effects in ellipsis environments. It is argued here that the alleviation of Principle C violations (“antire construction effects”), where it occurs in Ā-chains, is due not to deletion of the lower copy, as in Chomsky 1995, but to vehicle change. The introduction of vehicle change into the theory of Ā-chains is independently motivated as essential to capturing a robust adjunct/nonadjunct distinction in the reconstruction of pronoun-as-bound-variable readings that has not been discussed up to now; at the same time it predicts the class of “weakest crossover” environments.