Orphans hosted by VP anaphora Daniel Hardt, Line Mikkelsen, Bjarne Ørsnes Copenhagen Business School, University of California Berkeley, Freie Universit¨ at Berlin 1. Introduction Overt VP anaphors like do so, do it and do the same can host a following PP (Culicover & Jackendoff (2005:285–6), Huddleston & Pullum (2002:1533), Miller (2011:5–6), Sobin (2008:150, 155–157)): (1) The House is set to take up the final version of the funding bill tomorrow. The Senate will do the same on Thursday. [COCA] (2) You have jilted two previous fiances and I expect you would do the same to me. [COCA] Using (1) to fix terminology, the ANAPHOR is do the same, the ANTECEDENT is take up the final version of the funding bill, the ORPHAN is on Tuesday, and the CORRELATE is tomorrow. Examples like (2) are of particular interest because the correlate (two previous fiances) is inside the antecedent and, consequently, the orphan and the antecedent must interact to produce the interpretation of the clause containing the anaphor. In order to arrive at the interpretation ‘you would jilt me’, the me of the orphan must take the place of two previous fiances inside the antecedent VP. A superficially similar situation arises with remnants of ellipsis, including pseudogapping (3), sluicing (4), and fragment answers (5). In each case, the interpretation of the ellipsis clause combines part of the antecedent with all or part of the remnant. (3) I wouldn’t say that to my mother, but I would to you. (4) I know he gave the dresser away, but I don’t know to who. (5) Q: Who did he give the dresser to? A: To me. Remnants have been argued to escape ellipsis by extraction (e.g. Jayaseelan (1990) for pseudogapping, Merchant (2001) for sluicing and Merchant (2004) for fragments), which prompts us to ask whether orphans hosted by overt VP anaphora, as in (2), can similarly be analyzed as extractees. Our answer is that they cannot. We show that orphans behave differently from remnants of ellipsis and argue that orphans are base-generated adjuncts to the anaphoric VP, as opposed to extracted from that VP. We further propose that the interpretation of VP anaphora with orphans involve lambda abstraction over the correlate, effectively creating a “slot” for the orphan in the meaning constructed for the anaphor. In support of this analysis we show that the position of the correlate is syntactically unconstrained, as expected if the correlate is only identified semantically as the target of lambda abstraction. On the other hand, not all orphans are possible with all antecedent VPs and we tentatively propose that this is due to a * This work was made possible by a grant to the three authors from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology, and Innovation and a grant to Ørsnes from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinscahft (DFG) (grant no. MU 2822/2-1). We are also grateful to John Beavers, Peter Culicover, Caroline Heycock, Michael Houser, Andy Kehler, Russell Lee-Goldman, Beth Levin, Ivan Sag, Maziar Toosarvandani and audiences at Stanford (CUSP 3 & Ellips’Event), the Copenhagen Business School (Syntax Semantics Workshop), and, of course, University of Arizona (WCCFL 29) for feedback, data, ideas, and help with the literature. We are especially indebted to Jason Merchant and Ray Jackendoff, who commented on an earlier draft of this paper. Some of Ray Jackendoff’s comments challenge our analysis and we hope to address them in future work. Corpus examples are annotated with their source: BNC = British National Corpus, COCA = Corpus of Contemporary American English, EP = Europarl corpus, GW = GigaWord. Unannotated examples are constructed. Melissa Valdez and Nicholas Strzelczyk extracted and annotated corpus examples from GigaWord as part of UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. c  2011 Daniel Hardt, Line Mikkelsen, Bjarne Ørsnes Cascadilla Proceedings Project Completed July 15, 2011