Comparative Study of Verb Phrase Ellipsis: English and Chinese

仙台英語学談話会　東北大学

In this paper I propose that Chinese VPE is derived from PF deletion. The Sloppy reading and Extraction (A-movement and A’-movement) are used to examine Chinese sentence types such as Deontic, Negation meiyou, and ye shi, to see if Chinese allows VPE. The similarities are that the Epistemic both Chinese and English cannot license VPE, whereas Deontic and Negation can. The differences are that both Chinese Progressive zai and passive morpheme bei cannot license VPE.
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