VP Ellipsis and Semantic Identity

While it is generally agreed that an elliptical Verb Phrase must be identical to its antecedent, the precise formulation of the identity condition is controversial. I present a semantic identity condition on VP ellipsis: the elided VP must have the same meaning as its antecedent. I argue that a semantic identity condition is superior to a syntactic condition on both empirical and theoretical grounds. In addition, I show that the proposed condition differs significantly from previously proposed semantic conditions, in that other approaches do not take into account the dynamic nature of semantic representation. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-93-04. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_reports/414 VP Ellipsis and Semantic Identity MS-CIS-93-04 LINC LAB 243