Vehicle Change and Reconstruction in Ā-Chains

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Fiengo and May (1994) argue that what they call “vehicle change,” which permits copies of names to be evaluated as pronouns with respect to interpretive principles, plays a key role in accounting for reconstruction effects in ellipsis environments. It is argued here that the alleviation of Principle C violations (“antire construction effects”), where it occurs in Ā-chains, is due not to deletion of the lower copy, as in Chomsky 1995, but to vehicle change. The introduction of vehicle change into the theory of Ā-chains is independently motivated as essential to capturing a robust adjunct/nonadjunct distinction in the reconstruction of pronoun-as-bound-variable readings that has not been discussed up to now; at the same time it predicts the class of “weakest crossover” environments.