Ellipsis, Economy, and the (Non)uniformity of Traces

Abstract

A number of works have attempted to account for the interaction between movement and ellipsis in terms of an economy condition Max- Elide. We show that the elimination of MaxElide leads to an empirically superior account of these interactions. We show that a number of the core effects attributed to MaxElide can be accounted for with a parallelism condition on ellipsis. The remaining cases are then treated with a generalized economy condition that favors shorter derivations over longer ones. The resulting analysis has no need for the ellipsisspecific economy constraint MaxElide.