Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis in Najdi Arabic

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to establish that Najdi Arabic (NA, henceforth) has the property of verb-stranding VP ellipsis. This claim is cross linguistically contingent on V-to-T movement.  Four diagnostics of verb-stranding VP ellipsis have also been examined in NA: licensing of inflectional head, islands insensitivity, sloppy identity interpretation, and antecedent-contained deletion. Together, the outcome supports our claim that NA has verb-stranding VP ellipsis. The paper proposes an account of this construction and provides various arguments against the null object hypothesis.