ABSTRACT
The analysis of English verbal morphology of Lasnik (1995e) and Chapter 2 above has been challenged by Roberts (1998) and Potsdam (1997). Here, I respond to those challenges. Lasnik (1995e) was actually primarily concerned with the basic ordering of verbal elements with respect to negation. In particular, the concern was the classic Chomsky (1955, 1957) adjacency requirement on Affix Hopping preventing the association of Infl and V across an intervening not, as in *Mary not hired John/*Mary hired not John. I showed how a strictly lexicalist account of verbal morphology, like that in Chomsky (1993) has great difficulty in dealing with the distribution of negation. I therefore proposed a partial return to the Chomsky (1955, 1957) account, where in underlying structure, Infl is a syntactically independent item. On the other hand, I argued that auxiliary verbs are “lexicalist.” This hybrid theory handles the full range of facts about negation in English. Additionally, I argued, it handles a surprising gap in the paradigm of English VP-ellipsis: John slept and Mary will too/*John was here and Mary will too. Roberts and Potsdam, concentrating just on this ellipsis fact, propose an alternative that relies on a special constraint on ellipsis. I show that that alternative faces serious empirical and technical difficulties.
