Vehicle Change and Anti-pronominal Contexts1

Christopher Potts Fiengo and May (1994) seek to explain the absence of certain Principle C violations in elided structures by appeal to a mechanism of vehicle change, which realizes names as pronominal correlates in elided syntax. The impossibility of certain extractions shows that elided phrases contain anti-pronominal contexts (ACs)environments that preclude definite pronouns of various sorts. Therefore, the vehicle change analysis predicts a Principle C violation if a name in an elided AC is c-commanded by a coreferential pronoun, since a pronominal correlate would be ungrammatical. But the prediction does not bear out. Thus, an explanation for the missing Principle C violations has not yet been provided.