ABSTRACT
Verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VVPE) has been identified in a variety of languages, including Irish (McCloskey 1991), Hebrew (Doron 1991; Goldberg 2005), Russian (Gribanova 2013a, 2013b), and Hindi-Urdu (Manetta, to appear). This chapter concerns the so-called “adverb test” for diagnosing VVPE (e.g. Matos 1992; Oku 1998; Goldberg 2005; Simpson, Chowdhury, and Menon 2013), and in particular a solution to the puzzling failure of this test in languages that have otherwise been argued to exhibit VVPE. I propose an account which posits that the apparent failure of the adverb test emerges due to the interaction of ellipsis, verb movement, and contrastive polarity (following insights in Gribanova 2017). I claim that in contrastive environments in which the verb moves as high as a TP-external polarity head, MaxElide forces ellipsis of the largest possible constituent. The upshot is that the string that would appear to indicate failure of the adverb test is not a string generated by ellipsis at all, but instead by a missing internal argument. This project contributes to the wider program of recent work investigating the nature of head movement and its role in the syntax (Chomsky 2001; Hartman 2011; Keine and Bhatt 2016; LaCara 2016; McCloskey 2016).
