The Acceptability Cline in VP Ellipsis Christina S. Kim, Gregory M. Kobele, Jeffrey T. Runner, and John T. Hale Abstract. This paper lays the foundations for a processing model of relative acceptability levels in verb phrase ellipsis (VPE). In the proposed model, mismatching VPE examples are grammatical but less acceptable because they violate heuristic parsing strategies. This analysis is presented in a Minimalist Grammar formalism that is compatible with standard parsing techniques. The overall proposal integrates computational assumptions about parsing with a psycholinguistic linking hypothesis. These parts work together with the syntactic analysis to derive novel predictions that are confirmed in a controlled experiment. 1. Introduction The term verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) refers to a construction in which a verb phrase (VP) that intuitively ought to appear fails to do so. Example 1 shows a simple case. (1) a. Jill betrayed Abby, and Matt did, too. b. Jill betrayed Abby, and Matt betrayed Abby, too. c. Jill betrayed Abby, and Matt did betray Abby , too. VPE sentences pose two main analytical problems: (i) under what conditions can a VP be omitted, and (ii) what do sentences with missing VPs mean? In connection with this second question, it is easy to see that (1a) is synonymous with (1b). Indeed, a paraphrase such as (1b) can serve as a tool to characterize the missing VP. We indicate this by striking it out, as in (1c). This purely notational convention already suggests an analysis. On this analysis, (1a) and (1b) have the same syntactic structure. There is no missing VP in the syntax. Rather, the phonological properties of the missing VP have been ÔÔdeletedÕÕ in (1a) but not in (1b). This analysis reduces the meaning-problem (ii) to the problem of sentence-meaning in general. The meaning of an elliptical sentence could be computed compositionally from its phonologically unexpressed syntactic structure. However, this progress on problem (ii) underlines the urgency of problem (i). Any such analysis must appeal to conditions on the applicability of deletion in explaining the synonymy between (1a) and (1b). In (1) as in other cases of VPE the deleted material is similar to material elsewhere in the sentence. We will refer to this material as the antecedent. Transformational grammars of the 1960s typically required deleted expressions to have an identical antecedent elsewhere in the clause (Lees 1960, Chomsky 1964). This identity requirement, the condition on recoverability of deletion (CRD), is appealing from the The authors are grateful for the improvements to this work suggested by audiences at CUNY 2008, the Ohio State University (February 2008), University of Michigan (March 2008), Potsdam University (May 2009), Formal Grammar (July 2009), and the University of Delaware (December 2009). Ó 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Syntax 14:4, December 2011, 318–354 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9612.2011.00160.x