1 Introduction

Syntactic configurations involving the interaction of VP-sized (or larger) constituent ellipsis with head movement out of the ellipsis site (1) merit attention for the opportunity they present to investigate critical questions about the workings and architectural status of both head movement and ellipsis.

The landing site of the head movement (the identity of F) may vary according to the language, as may the size of the ellipsis site (the identity of XP) — marked by the circle in (1). The result of such a combination of operations is typically realized as an overt verb whose internal — and sometimes external — arguments, along with any modifying material internal to the elided constituent, are elided.²

As with constituent ellipsis more generally, in a configuration like (1), the elided component will be subject to some kind of requirement — the formulation of which remains controversial — that it be identical to a linguistic antecedent.³ On many prominent accounts, the identity relation that is necessary to license ellipsis applies to the output of a syntactic derivation. One of the well established facts about phrasal movement out of ellipsis sites is that lexical identity of the extracted constituent to its antecedent is not necessary:

Such patterns follow from the understanding that WH-extraction leaves behind variables, which do not count as distinct for the purposes of most ellipsis licensing conditions (Rooth 1992; Heim 1997; Merchant 2001).

In the case of head movement out of an ellipsis site, expectations about identity requirements on the extracted elements depend on commitments about the architectural status of head movement. Are the components of the stranded verb that originate inside the ellipsis site (e.g. X and V in (1), but not F) required to be lexically identical to their antecedent counterparts? If head movement is uniformly syntactic and copies of heads are treated identically to copies of phrases — as maintained either implicitly or explicitly by proposals like that of Travis (1984); Baker (1985); Matushansky (2006); Roberts (2010), among others — we expect mismatches to be possible under contrast crosslinguistically, by analogy with phrasal movement (4). This would take the form of a mismatch of e.g. the root of a stranded verb in VSE, when compared to antecedent verbs. If head movement is uniformly a postsyntactic operation — as maintained by proposals like that of Chomsky (2000); Brody (2000); Hale & Keyser (2002); Harley (2004; 2013); Platzack (2013); Hall (2015); Svenonius (2016), among others — then the prediction is that the identity relation in ellipsis licensing, if applied to the output of syntax, will apply to elements of the head-moved verb as if it had not moved — that is, that absolute morphosyntactic identity will be required of the verb root to its antecedent, crosslinguistically (Schoorlemmer & Temmerman 2012).

Finally, there remains the possibility that the range of effects modeled by head movement (qua syntactic head adjunction) — long head movement, roll-up head movement, incorporation, among others — can be factored into two groups and correspondingly accounted for by distinct mechanisms. This is precisely the approach that is argued for by Harizanov & Gribanova (2019) (henceforth H&G), who argue for this distinction on the grounds that it resolves well known theoretical challenges faced by head movement with the advent of the Minimalist Program (see Matushansky 2006; Roberts 2010 for discussion) and makes sense of the diverse empirical properties we observe of the various phenomena that have been traditionally modeled by head movement. On this proposal, one type of head movement is modeled by genuine movement of a head in the syntax, and has syntactic properties: it is governed by the same locality as phrasal movement, potentially violating the head movement constraint (Travis 1984); it may potentially give rise to interpretive effects; it obeys the Extension Condition, resulting in the effect of upward movement; and it does not result in complex morphosyntactic structures, but rather gives rise to word order permutations. An altogether different group has properties that violate standard assumptions about what a syntactic computation can do (Chomsky 2000), and is therefore modeled by a postsyntactic operation (Amalgamation) that either Raises or Lowers (Embick & Noyer 2001) a head into a head adjunction structure. Amalgamation obeys the head movement constraint; it never gives rise to interpretive effects; it builds morphosyntactic complexes, which can correspond to words; and the resulting morphological complex may be pronounced in a variety of positions along the part of the extended projection.

The predictions made by the H&G approach for the identity requirements imposed on elements like V and X in (1) are, for better or worse, more fine grained than they are in accounts that take head movement to be a unified phenomenon. As explored in Gribanova (2018b), if H&G’s proposal is on the right track, we expect that the (independently motivated) syntactic status of a given range of head movements in some language should yield the possibility of mismatches between the extracted elements and their antecedents, analogous to what we find with phrasal movement in (4). By contrast, if a given range of head movements is postsyntactic, we expect an absolute matching requirement imposed upon the elements that appear extracted (since in the syntax, those elements remain in situ). In broad strokes, H&G’s proposal leads us to expect crosslinguistic variation with respect to identity requirements imposed on X and V in (1): the (independently motivated) architectural status of a given instance of head movement will determine whether mismatches are permitted.⁴

Clear as the predictions made by these various perspectives may be, it has been difficult to establish a steady picture of the empirical landscape of matching requirements in VSE crosslinguistically. The initial studies of VSE in Hebrew (Doron 1990; Goldberg 2005a; b) and Irish (McCloskey 2012; 2017) made the case that verbal mismatches, even under contrast, were not possible in VSE; an Irish example is provided in (5).

With the expectation that this observation should hold crosslinguistically, the effect was enshrined as the Verbal Identity Condition (VIC). Proposals were put forth about the uniformly postsyntactic status of the head movement involved (Schoorlemmer & Temmerman 2012), as this would provide a way of explaining the contrasting behavior of VSE with phrasal movement out of ellipsis sites (4). Since these initial investigations, Hebrew has been successfully reanalyzed by Landau (2018) as involving not VSE, but rather ellipsis of individual arguments of the verb (Argument Ellipsis, AE) and the verbal identity effect in Hebrew has also been demonstrated not to hold. Russian (Gribanova 2013c; 2017), European Portuguese (Santos 2009), Greek (Merchant 2018), Persian (Rasekhi 2018), and Hungarian (Lipták 2013), among other languages, have also been shown to permit mismatches of the extracted verb in VSE under contrast; a Russian example is below.

Depending on one’s perspective, this apparent crosslinguistic diversity in the behavior of head movement out of ellipsis sites — represented here by the contrast between Irish and Russian — may seem either like an indirect indication that head movement is far more complicated than we once thought, or like an inconvenient observation that ought to be explained away.

The latter position is expressed by Landau (2018: 2), who calls the VIC a “theoretical nuisance”: if the VIC is accurate, it follows that head movement (a) must differ in a principled way from phrasal movement, and (b) head movement, is, strikingly, not even different from phrasal movement in a crosslinguistically consistent way within VSE configurations — that is, it becomes impossible to assert that head movement is monolithic in its behavior. It is possible to avoid this conclusion if the behavior of either the Russian-type languages or the Irish-type languages in VSE can be explained in some other way entirely. A way forward along this analytical path presents itself when we consider that the most well established examples in the VIC-obeying language group are Irish and Scottish Gaelic (Thoms 2016; 2018), and these are members of the same language family. Merchant (2018) and Thoms (2018) pursue versions of this path, exploring explanations for the VIC pattern that are specific to Irish (Merchant 2018) or found in both Irish and Scottish Gaelic (Thoms 2018). The idea explored in those works is that in these languages, the VSO configuration that is the prerequisite for VSE is incompatible with the pitch accent that would be needed to put narrow focus on the finite verb. This incompatibility yields a situation in which narrow contrastive focus on verbs in VSE is not permitted, for reasons that are unrelated to the architectural status of head movement.

If the VIC is independently explicable as a characteristic of Goedelic languages, and it cannot convincingly be demonstrated to hold in any other language, then the possibility arises that the VIC effect has nothing whatsoever to do with head movement, and further, that in the general case (Russian, Hungarian, etc.), head movement out of ellipsis sites behaves just like phrasal movement with respect to the identity relation in ellipsis licensing. In order for VSE configurations to provide us with information about the status of head movement, then, we must first answer a pressing typological question about the crosslinguistic behavior of verb matching requirements in VSE configurations: is there a genuine class of languages — in the best case scenario, typologically diverse — that behaves like Irish and Scottish Gaelic? If such languages exist, we would need to show, further, that the VIC-obeying behavior we find in these languages is not due to independently attested constraints on the placement of focal pitch accent on verbs. My claim in this paper is that Uzbek — an understudied Turkic language of Central Asia — has genuine VSE in Uzbek strictly obeys the VIC, and this is not explainable by appealing to language-specific constraints on the placement of focal pitch accent. The broader claim that there exists a class of such languages is also supported by recent work on Lithuanian (Portelance 2020), where the same logic is pursued. If we strengthen the position that such a group of languages genuinely exists, then we also strengthen the case for proposals like that of H&G, in which there is both a syntactic and postsyntactic type of head movement, with correspondingly distinct properties when it comes to the interaction with ellipsis licensing.⁵

In this paper, I use novel data from Uzbek to argue that there is genuine crosslinguistic variation with respect to whether VSE configurations respect an absolute lexical matching requirement on the material head-moved out of an ellipsis domain. The picture of VSE constructions that emerges from close analysis of Uzbek is one in which the inconvenient situation is actually the correct one: head movement out of ellipsis sites in VSE configurations differs crosslinguistically in the identity conditions that are imposed on the material stranded outside the ellipsis site. There is genuinely a group of languages — including (minimally) Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Lithuanian, and now Uzbek — in which head movement out of an elided constituent obeys the VIC, and in doing so behaves differently from phrasal movement when it comes to the identity relation in ellipsis licensing (the conclusion in (a)). With this much in place, we can observe that head movement in the VIC-obeying group of languages must be distinct from both phrasal movement generally and from head movement in languages like Russian, where we find violations of the VIC (the conclusion in (b)). This empirical picture finds an explanation in the independently supported idea that a certain class of head movements is postsyntactic in nature, while others are syntactic in nature (Harizanov & Gribanova 2019) — a connection that I leave largely for future exploration.

A combination of factors makes Uzbek a particularly productive language in which to address these questions. One reason it has been difficult to establish both (a) and (b) in the past is that investigation of strings like (2) and (3) across languages introduces empirical quandaries that can be difficult resolve. The first quandary is that there are other operations that can yield VSE-like surface strings in certain languages. These operations include at least the availability of argument drop and the availability of AE, which elides individual arguments of the verb. Indeed, the literature on VSE-like configurations in East Asian languages seems to have converged on an analysis that favors AE over a genuine VSE analysis (Saito 1985; Kim 1999; Hoji 1998; Oku 1998), and Landau (2018) has recently presented a convincing reanalysis of Hebrew as a language that uses exclusively AE, and not VSE. For every language in which a VSE-like surface string is attested, it remains the job of the analyst to differentiate between a genuine VSE and an AE analysis of that string, if AE is demonstrably available (as it is for Uzbek). A second quandary is that for a VSE analysis to hold in a given language, one should be able to find independent evidence of head movement taking place in that language. As pointed out by Han et al. (2007), among others, this is an especially difficult thing to accomplish in head-final languages like Uzbek, since the result of such a head movement operation would be string vacuous, and there are other independently required operations that could yield a very similar surface result (Harley 2013). As I demonstrate in this paper, understanding the predicate formation strategies of Uzbek yields crucial advances in our ability to tell apart AE constructions from strings that come from genuine VSE.

After introducing some of the relevant details of Uzbek (§2), I demonstrate that Uzbek uses differing strategies for verbal vs. non-verbal predicate formation: the former are composed by head movement, while the latter may be expressed as a word-like string by application of Local Dislocation, a postsyntactic operation distinct from head movement (§3). This bifurcation predicts that verbs may participate in VSE constructions in Uzbek, and I demonstrate that this prediction is borne out in §4, differentiating along the way between environments that bias toward an AE analysis vs. environments in which only VSE can apply. Using these initial pieces of the analysis as leverage, I show in §5 that environments in which only VSE can apply are also the environments in which verbal identity is enforced very strictly: narrow (contrastive) focus on the verb does not facilitate mismatches between the stranded and antecedent verbs in Uzbek VSE, although verbal mismatches are readily attested elsewhere, including in surface-similar strings generated by AE; this strengthens the argument that the VIC is really obeyed in a range of typologically unrelated languages. §6 concludes by drawing the discussion back to the consequences of the Uzbek findings for H&G’s proposal and the architectural status of head movement more generally.

2 Uzbek: Preliminaries

Uzbek is an understudied Turkic language spoken in Central Asia, primarily in Uzbekistan (25–30 million speakers, by current estimates). Like other Turkic languages, it is agglutinating (suffixing) in its morphology, SXOV, and consistently head-final. Uzbekistan is a doubly land-locked country, and is bordered on several sides by other Turkic-speaking nations; there is consequently a significant amount of regional syntactic and morphosyntactic variation, which will become relevant in §3. It is important to note that speakers consulted in this study are not monolingual speakers of Uzbek; this is consistent with the more general trend for the region, which until the early 1990s was under Soviet rule.

The empirical basis for this paper comes from grammaticality judgments collected through fieldwork with native Uzbek speakers in Uzbekistan, Russia, and various locales in the US. A majority of the argumentation presented here draws on two datasets, which are archived online, anonymized, and publicly accessible at the Stanford Digital Repository. The first of these is the basis for the discussion in §3 and Appendix A, and contains judgments from 11 speakers from different regions of Uzbekistan about the possible morphological forms taken by Uzbek verbal and non-verbal predicates.⁶ Parts of this pattern have been documented in Kononov (1960), but the data presented here are both more recent and in some ways more complete. The second dataset⁷ focuses on Uzbek VSE, AE, and the VIC, and forms the basis for the discussion in §4–§5 and Appendix B. It contains judgments from five native Uzbek speakers, though not all speakers may have provided a judgment for every example.⁸ For all the examples discussed in this paper, judgments across speakers were consistent except where otherwise noted. Further discussion about the approach taken here to data collection and archiving, as well as motivations for various choices made along the way, can be found in Gribanova (To appear).

3 Uzbek predicate formation

While the main thrust of this paper centers on the properties of Uzbek VSE, it is also the case that a VSE account of Uzbek strings analogous to (2,3) is predicated on the claim that the verb is being head-moved to some position outside of an ellipsis domain. This section is dedicated to providing a series of arguments in favor of head movement of the verb, in contrast to the absence of head movement in non-verbal predication. This contrast will become crucial in following sections, as it gives us a direct way to probe the difference between genuine instances of VSE in Uzbek and instances of AE, which may appear similar on the surface.

4 Ellipsis & the height of head movement

The analytical commitments I outlined in §3 give rise to the possibility that, given the existence of an ellipsis operation that elides a VP (or larger) constituent, verbs may be stranded outside of that ellipsis site as a result of having head-moved to a higher position. The result of such an interaction of operations would be a configuration in which the verb is pronounced, but any VP-internal arguments or adjuncts are elided under identity with an antecedent.

On the surface, such configurations are certainly attested — see (37b) and (38) — but it is another task entirely to demonstrate that they are best analyzed as VSE, rather than individual argument drop or argument ellipsis. Before proceeding, note that for Uzbek verb-stranding ellipsis, the most natural translation into English would probably involve verb phrase ellipsis. In the discussion that follows, however, the question at issue will often be the reconstructed meaning of the omitted components. For this reason, here and throughout the paper I will opt for an unelided translation in the third line of each example, putting in square brackets the pieces that are omitted in Uzbek, but whose meaning is nevertheless interpreted.

This section is dedicated to arguing that such strings may be the result of more than one available mechanism for the omission or non-pronunciation of syntactic material. These mechanisms include argument drop, argument ellipsis, and verb-stranding ellipsis. Below, specific syntactic environments are identified in which only one of these operations may apply, but not the others. Since the primary goal of this paper is to probe the interaction of head movement and ellipsis in VSE, the latter subsections begin this discussion by examining more closely the question of how large the ellipsis site is in VSE. This examination requires me to return to the syntax of non-verbal predication, as the lack of omission strategies in copular clauses plays a helpful role in the identification of the head that licenses ellipsis in Uzbek VSE.

5 The Verbal Identity Condition in Uzbek

With a sense of the distribution of Uzbek AE and VSE in place, we can now proceed to the question of whether the VIC holds, and the degree to which it holds strictly, in this language. AE configurations are not at issue here, since they by definition do not involve ellipsis that targets any part of the verbal complex. Indeed, verbal mismatch in the general case of missing arguments is permitted, as long as the string is one which permits an AE analysis.

Although a mismatch is permitted between the verb roots of the stranded and antecedent verbs in (58), the interpretation of the elided material is one in which the depictive predicate is not inside the ellipsis site; this indicates strongly that an AE operation is at work here.

By contrast with AE, genuine VSE constructions target for ellipsis a constituent that includes at least part of the VP, and for this reason we may expect a VIC effect to arise if Uzbek is in the same class with e.g. Irish (but not otherwise). This is what we find in Uzbek VSE configurations, and it is already supported by (58): mismatches between verbs are tolerated, but in that case, VSE cannot have applied, because the adjectival predicate is not interpreted as part of the elided material. That genuine VSE is not compatible with verbal mismatches is also apparent in cases where the complement of a verb like seem or become goes missing. Narrow or contrastive focus on the verb root in such environments — indicated by bolding of the relevant verbs — is not possible, even when the discourse conditions are such that it ought, in theory, to be licensed.²⁹

The missing material in (59b) and (60b) is a predicative AP, which has already been demonstrated to be subject only to VSE, and never to AE. This is therefore a genuine instance of VSE, which furthermore is subject to a strict matching constraint on the verb root of the stranded verb.

An environment that seems to give mixed results is that of polar questions, where in principle both a VSE and an AE analysis of the verb-stranded response should be permissible. Some speakers are comfortable treating verbal mismatches in such environments as a cue that AE has applied (just as in (58)), and find the result acceptable as long as the adjectival predicate is not included in the interpretation. Other speakers judge the entire string as unacceptable unless it remains unelided, as in (61d) — suggesting that they can only apply a VSE parse to the responses in (61b, c).

This mixed result suggests a split in the way that speakers interpret single-verb responses to polar questions — a perhaps not surprising result, given that differences between a VSE parse and an AE parse are going to be very subtle in the absence of controls (like the presence of an AP predicate in the elided constituent). There is an obvious sense in which much more work needs to be done in order to understand which syntactic and pragmatic factors might lead speakers to favor one parse over another in a given set of circumstances. It is also possible that certain speakers may, in the absence of particularly robust evidence, choose only one analytical possibility and exclude the other entirely — a possibility explored, though for a different syntactic paradigm, by Han et al. (2007; 2016). Whatever the explanation for the variable judgments associated with (61), it is striking that no speakers permitted both a VSE analysis — as indicated by an interpretation in (61b, c) that does not include the adjective raw — and a mismatch in between the verbs in the verb-stranding expressions in (61b, c). Together with evidence from (59) and (60), where the unavailability of mismatch comes together with environments that unambiguously involve VSE, this constitutes strong evidence that VSE obeys the VIC in Uzbek, even under conditions that might plausibly facilitate verbal mismatch.

To the extent the data and arguments presented here are convincing, the conclusion is that Uzbek is a member of the class of VIC-obeying languages, while crucially being typologically not related to other members of that group (namely Lithuanian, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic). It is also the case that the Uzbek evidence provides a strong argument against the proposal that the source of such effects can always be attributed to independently observable facts about the way in which narrow focus on verbs is expressed in a given language. The introduction to this paper delineated two ways in which to understand VIC effects, when they arise. One source for such effects may be the manner in which head movement and ellipsis interact, as suggested in Schoorlemmer & Temmerman (2012); McCloskey (2017); Gribanova (2018b). An alternative explanation, pursued independently by Thoms (2018) and Merchant (2018), is that in the languages where the VIC obtains, it obtains because main verbs are unable to host the pitch accent obligatorily associated with narrow focus in the configurations that might otherwise give rise to VSE. Thoms (2018) shows, for example, that for Scottish Gaelic, the configurations which give rise to VSE — VSO word orders — are such that the verb cannot host the pitch accent associated with narrow focus. Instead, narrow focus on verbs is expressed via a cleft. Merchant (2018) bases his discussion on recent work by Bennett et al. (2019) on the syntax-prosody of ellipsis in Irish VSO word orders. One of the many contributions of Bennett et al. (2019) is a demonstration that Irish verbal stems in VSO orders cannot bear the pitch accent associated with focus prominence. When verb stems are focused in VSE, the pitch accent is realized not on the verb itself, but on an incorporated subject pronoun which is realized in just those cases where focus prominence on the verb stem arises and requires a realization. Merchant’s (2018) point is that narrow focus on verb stems in VSE configurations like (5), repeated below as (62), would require realization of a pitch accent that, for language-specific reasons, has no appropriate host in (62).

Both Thoms and Merchant, then, are able to identify a potential explanation for VIC effects in Scottish Gaelic and Irish, respectively, which is not at all related to the interaction of head movement with ellipsis. On this perspective, we may expect that in languages with VSE where a VIC effect is attested, we should be able to find independent evidence that verb stems simply cannot host the realization of focus prominence in the configurations of interest, giving rise to unacceptability of verbal mismatch.

The Uzbek data presented thus far take on a special significance in the context of these arguments. While it is possible that VIC effects in Irish and Scottish Gaelic are amenable to language-specific explanations related to the inability of verbal stems to host focal pitch accent in the relevant configurations, the question remains whether such an explanation can extend to the entire range of languages in which such effects are attested. The Uzbek evidence provides a strong indication that it cannot. This is because, as (59a), (60b), and (61d) show, contexts with no elision fully support contrastive focus on verb stems, in the traditional verb-final word order that would also be involved in VSE configurations. Put another way, no difficulty whatsoever arises when Uzbek verbs are contrastively focused in the general case. This is straightforward to demonstrate in a variety of other contexts as well. First, as (58) strikingly shows, no ungrammaticality arises when verbal mismatch occurs with AE, and yields strings that are on the surface very similar to those in e.g. (59b). This demonstrates that the ungrammaticality of verbal mismatch is specific to VSE contexts, and shows that other grammatical configurations permit verbal mismatch straightforwardly. Second, Uzbek focus-sensitive operators faqat(gina) and xolos, both of which mean something like ‘only’, can associate with the verb.

As expected, while the use of xolos in association with a focused verb is acceptable in general (63, 64a), its use in VSE configurations where the VIC is violated does nothing to ameliorate the result (64b).

Given the availability of focal contrast on Uzbek verbs in the general case, nothing should prevent this same strategy from obtaining in VSE; yet, verbal contrast in VSE is still not acceptable, as (59b), (60b), (61b, c), and (64b) show. Therefore, the Uzbek VIC effect cannot be attributed to the same explanation that obtains for Irish and Scottish Gaelic. At least for Uzbek, then, an alternative explanation for the VIC effect is required; there is of course an available explanatory path that, if pursued, would reintroduce into the discussion the interaction of head movement with ellipsis. The strength of the case for this move hinges on there being a robust set of languages that are like Uzbek in obeying the VIC in VSE configurations and yet regularly permitting contrastive focus on verbs in the general case, in the same syntactic environments (modulo the application of ellipsis, of course). The case study presented here is therefore an initial step in that direction, and much more work remains to be done; it is worth pointing out, however, that Portelance (2020) has made a strong case that Lithuanian VSE also obeys the VIC, and that this effect also cannot be attributed to the inability of verbs to host narrow focus. It seems quite possible that other languages with these same properties can and will be identified as researchers in this area continue to investigate to the relevant configurations across a diverse array of languages.

6 Conclusion

I have argued in this paper that Uzbek has two operations — AE and VSE — which can result in identical or very similar surface strings. Nevertheless, the two operations can be distinguished from each other, primarily in configurations where predicative phrases are elided; this is possible only for a VSE operation, but not an AE operation. I have also made the case that in configurations that are characteristic only of VSE, a lexical identity condition holds, wherein the verb root is required to be identical to an antecedent verb root (the VIC). This makes head movement out of the ellipsis site different from syntactic phrasal movement, which typically permits such mismatches if the extracted pieces are also contrastively focused. Finally, in §5, I argued that this strict identity condition in the case of VSE cannot be explained by way of appealing to independently attested constraints on the interaction between discourse structure and the syntax of Uzbek. This latter point is particularly important, since other languages in which the VIC genuinely holds may be amenable to explanations related precisely to independently attested constraints on how narrow focus on verbs can be expressed (Merchant 2018; Thoms 2018). Verb roots/stems in Uzbek can host the relevant pitch accent in ellipsis and non-ellipsis configurations, which means that the inability to have mismatching verbs in VSE must be explained in a manner that does not resemble the explanations in Merchant 2018 and Thoms 2018 for Irish and Scottish Gaelic, respectively.

This result supports the existence and applicability of a different type of explanation for the VIC, which has been pursued recently by Gribanova (2018b). Recall that we are trying to explain not only why Uzbek verbs obey the VIC in VSE configurations, but also why other languages — Russian (Gribanova 2013c), Hungarian (Lipták 2013), Greek (Merchant 2018), among others — do not. The possibility explored in Gribanova (2018b) is that the architectural status of the head movement involved should have direct consequences for identity requirements on the pieces of the verb that were extracted from the ellipsis domain. The proposal is based on H&G’s recent work on head movement; their argument is that one type of head movement is modeled by genuine movement of a head in the syntax, and has syntactic properties: it is governed by the same locality as phrasal movement (potentially violating the head movement constraint (Travis 1984)); it may potentially give rise to interpretive effects; it obeys the Extension Condition, resulting in the effect of upward movement; and it does not result in complex morphosyntactic structures, but rather gives rise to word order permutations. An altogether different group has properties that violate standard assumptions about what a syntactic computation can do (Chomsky 2000), and is therefore modeled by a postsyntactic operation (Amalgamation) that either Raises or Lowers (Embick & Noyer 2001) a head into a head adjunction structure. This operation behaves differently: it obeys the head movement constraint; it never gives rise to interpretive effects; it builds morphosyntactic complexes, which can correspond to words; and the resulting complex may be pronounced in a variety of positions along the part of the extended projection.

The point made by Gribanova (2018b) is that such a distinction can be profitably leveraged to explain the presence or absence of the VIC in a language with genuine VSE. Syntactic movement of heads should behave just like phrasal syntactic movement, and give rise to the same potential for lexical mismatch as phrasal movement. By contrast, under the common assumption that ellipsis licensing and the application of any identity requirements are applied to the output of syntax, postsyntactic amalgamation takes place at a point in the derivation that follows licensing. It follows that postsyntactic amalgamation ought to result directly in the VIC, since the output of syntax in such a derivation involves all of the pieces of the verb in situ, not moved syntactically. The account relies on the availability of independent evidence in favor of a particular instance of head movement in a particular language being of the syntactic or postsyntactic type. The explanation described here will be successful insofar an independently supported conclusion will then correspond to the behavior of that instance of head movement in that language yielding (or not yielding) a VIC effect in VSE.

Although such an approach seems to have potential, many details remain to be worked out; this paper has a rather more modest aim, which is to demonstrate that there is in fact a need for an explanation for the VIC that goes beyond language-specific factors relating to the inability of a language to associate focal pitch accent with verb stems. It should be noted that H&G’s approach is not the only one that is amenable to the kind of explanation elaborated here. Other approaches that take roll-up head movement to be the result of a differently implemented postsyntactic process (Hall 2015; Svenonius 2016; 2018) are likewise amenable to such an explanation, although not all of those approaches are explicit in how they would account for those head movements that do permit mismatches in VSE. There are also approaches besides H&G’s that admit a split in the behavior of head movement: although both types of head movement are taken to be syntactic, one is akin to phrasal movement (to a specifier position, along the lines of Matushansky 2006) and leaves behind copies, while the other defines an operation in which either a copy — as standardly understood — is not created (Arregi & Pietraszko 2018; 2020), or a copy is created, but is treated differently than phrasal copies would be (Saab 2019). Such approaches are also in theory compatible with the explanation sketched here; a thorough comparison lies beyond the scope of this investigation, but I hope to have made clear here the trajectory for further explorations in the domain of identity effects in VSE.

Abbreviations

1/2/3 = first/second/third person, ACC = accusative case, COMP = complementizer, CONV = converb suffix, COP = copula, DAT = dative case, E = phonological support for stranded tense/aspect, EMPH = a particle that marks contrastive topics, EVID = evidential, FUT = future, GEN = genitive case, HAB = habitual, LOC = locative case, NEG = negation, NMLZ = nominalizer, NOM = nominative case, PL = plural, POSS = possessive, PRS = present, PRF = perfect, PROG = progressive, PST = past, PTCP = participle, Q = polar question, SG = singular, VN = verbal noun.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.