A Minimalist Account Of English VP Ellipsis And Its Implication On Chinese VP Ellipsis

The grammar of natural language provides a broad array of mechanisms for implicit communication. One example of this is verb phrase ellipsis, in which a verb phrase is elided, its position marked only by an auxiliary verb. Such elliptical constructions are generally easily and unambiguously understood. In sentence like Mary likes singing, and so does Bill, the verbal phrase, in the second clause, likes singing is elided but there is no problem for any English speaker to understand that the sentence means: Mary likes singing and Bill likes singing too. This phenomenon of eliding the verbal phrase after its appearance in an antecedent clause is called verbal phrase ellipsis (VPE).The study of VP-ellipsis in English has a long tradition, especially in the realm of syntactic theory. It dates back to the 1970s by Hankamer and Sag (1976), and has always been a controversial issue since then. There have been semantic and syntactic approaches to this linguistic phenomenon. Its licensing condition has always been the focus of the discussion. It has been widely assumed that VP ellipsis is governed by an identity condition: the elided VP is interpreted as an identical copy of another expression in surrounding discourse (Hardt 1999). For example, Sag (1976) imposes an identity condition on Logical Form representations of VPs. A basic feature of this account is the requirement that a syntactic VP be available as the antecedent. This requirement is reflected in most subsequent accounts as well.In this paper I try to analyze the English verbal phrase ellipsis in the framework of Minimalist Program (MP) which is the newest development of the Generative Grammar. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation. Theories of VP shell and the V-to-v raising will be resorted to. In this paper, I will try to analyze the Chinese VPE under the same frame work,which is more complicated than English, for in Chinese, VP ellipsis are subdivided into Chinese vp ellipsis and Chinese null object construction.