Beyond MaxElide : an investigation of Ā-movement from Elided Phrases

Using Takahashi & Fox (2005) as an exemplar, this paper argues that analyses of English ellipsis that make recourse to a MaxElide constraint (first introduced by Merchant 2008) are misguided, and that one must look beyond MaxElide to explain the distribution of acceptability in the ‘rebinding’ elliptical constructions that MaxElide was originally invoked to explain. A novel analysis is outlined which attributes the unacceptability observed in the rebinding dataset to an inability to satisfy a more restrictive, reflexive version of Takahashi & Fox’s Parallelism condition on ellipsis recoverability. More broadly, the success of this analysis supports the notion that clausal and non-clausal ellipsis are governed by distinct recoverability conditions. This paper therefore provides support for a non-unitary approach to the semantic licensing of ellipsis.