On the Directionality of Conversion: A New Perspective from Category Mismatch under VP-Ellipsis

Abstract

In this paper, I address the directionality issue posed by conversion in English through an investigation of category mismatch under VP-ellipsis, a less-studied type of ellipsis mismatch. For example, certain nouns, such as graduateN and sneezeN, allow the ellipsis of the VP headed by their morphologically related verbal counterparts, graduateV and sneezeV, but not vice versa. I argue that this kind of directional asymmetry, which would be mysterious under a purely semantic identity approach to ellipsis, based on truth-conditional equivalence and mutual entailment, is accounted for in terms of the syntactic identity condition to the effect that the structure of an ellipsis site must be properly contained within the structure of its intended antecedent expression. I will then use this syntactic account of category-mismatched VP-ellipsis as a critical probe into the internal syntax of zero-related N-V pairs and show that both N→V and V→N word-based derivations, in addition to the root-based derivation, must be admitted to account for conversion in English. To the extent that my proposed analysis is on the right track, the kind of asymmetries observed in N-V conversion furnishes an excellent testing ground for an abstract syntactic derivation for these morphologically related word pairs.

Keywords

• category-mismatched VP-ellipsis
• syntactic identity condition
• directional asymmetry
• conversion
• distributed morphology
• phase theory