When Variable Re-binding Bleeds Antecedent-Contained Deletion * Jason Overfelt Haverford College 1. Introduction Ross (1967) observed the interesting property of VP-Ellipsis (VPE) that a pronoun inter- preted in the elided VP can refer ambiguously in the way shown in (1). Following Ross, we will refer to the faithful interpretation of the pronoun in (1a) as the strict reading and to the unfaithful interpretation in (1b) as the sloppy reading. (1) Tim 1 loves his 1 sister and you 2 also do Δ. a. strict : Δ = love his 1 sister b. sloppy : Δ = love your 2 sister A puzzle, which to my knowledge has not been discussed in the literature, is that sloppy pronouns are more restricted in the context of Antecedent-Contained Deletion (ACD) than they are in the context of coordinate VPE. The minimally differing examples in (2) and (3) provide the relevant contrast. (2) Tim 1 wanted his 1 brother to fix each bike that you 2 (also) did. a. strict : Δ = want his 1 brother to fix b. *sloppy : Δ = want your 2 brother to fix (3) Tim 1 wanted his 1 brother to fix each bike and you 2 also did. a. strict : Δ = want his 1 brother to fix each bike b. sloppy : Δ = want your 2 brother to fix each bike I will offer an account of this puzzle that is schematized roughly in (4) and (5) below. * Thank you to the reviewers and organizers for NELS 46 and to the editors of these proceedings. For helpful comments and discussion, I would like to thank Kyle Johnson, Rajesh Bhatt, Brian Dillon, Adrian Staub, Byron Ahn, Alex Drummond, Jeremy Hartman, Shizhe Huang, Keir Moulton, and the participants of the Faculty Workshop in the Tri-College Linguistics Department at Swarthmore College.