Research talk: Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis in Chinese yes–no questions

Lulu Guo, Queen Mary University of London

This talk is organised by the Linguistics satellite of Language@Leeds.

There is an ongoing debate concerning the (non-)existence of Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis (VSVPE). Landau (2020a,b, 2021, 2023 a.o.; contra Gribanova 2017,2020 a.o.) argues that there are no genuine cases of VSVPE. Rather, many purported instances reduce either to polarity ellipsis (Holmberg 2015; McCloskey 2017 a.o.) or to Argument Ellipsis (AE) (Hoji 1998, Oku 1998 a.o.). I show that Mandarin, which lacks overt v-to-higher-functional-head movement (Huang 1994 et seq.), does exhibit VSVPE patterns in yes–no questions. Contra Landau (2020b), I argue that v bears an [E]-feature that allows the ellipsis of its complement, and that this feature is activated only in the presence of pol.

Speaker bio

Lulu Guo received her MA in Linguistics from the University of Leeds in 2021. Her master’s thesis, supervised by Valentina Brunetto, investigated the experimental syntax of island effects in Chinese interrogatives. She began her PhD in 2022 under the supervision of David Adger and Coppe van Urk. Her research focuses on syntax and its interfaces with prosody and semantics.

Her work centres on three constructions: yes–no questions, Right-Node Raising (RNR), and coordination. At the LF interface, she investigates how interrogative meanings are derived in yes–no and alternative questions, as well as how elided material is semantically recovered. At the PF interface, she examines how unpronounced syntactic structure is formed and explores the role of prosody in the interpretation of elliptical constructions and RNR.