AntecedentContained Deletion and Pied-Piping: Evidence for a Variable-Free Semantics

ion) . From this it follows that: (2) The elided or missing material here must be a VP meaning (or, LF) , where the missing VP will contain an individual variable in object position. (3) It thus follows in tum that the antecedent must be some expression which has a VP-type of meaning (or, LF) . (4) But on the surface, there is no full VP which can supply the missing meaning (or, LF) . The only full VP itself contains the ellipsis site. Hence if we used this VP to determine the meaning of and/or LF of the "missing" material , we arrive at a paradox. (5) Thus, in order to avoid the antecedent containment paradox, we need a level of LF at which the object is pulled out and where there is a variable in its place. In other words, the LF for ( 1 1 ) is ( 12) � from here we can find the antecedent read x which can serve as the antecedent for the ellipsis: ( 12) every x: [book, x & John read xl [Bill did read xJ Cormack ( 1985) , however, shows that once one rejects the original assumption in ( 1 ) , there is no antecedent containment paradox here: the "missing" material can simply be a 2-place relation rather than a VP meaning. Thus the antecedent can simply be a transitive verb phrase (in this case, the simple transitive verb read). To elucidate, we will consider first the semantic composition of a non­ ellipsis case like ( 13) under a Categorial Grammar account of the semantics of relati ve clauses: ( 13) John read every boo k which Bill react. Actually, there is more than one (closely related) approaches to extraction within the general CG program (see, e. g . , Steedman, 1987 � Jacobson, 1 989� Oehrle, 1990) � for expository ease I will adopt the approach of Steedman ( 1987) , although similar remarks will for the other approaches. Thus assume that the way the meaning is put together here is that the 2-place relation read' simply function­ composes with the (type-lifted) meaning of Bill, as follows: ( 14) /..P[P(b)] 0 read' = Ax[read'(x)(b)]] Notice, incidentally, that in the " standard" account this also is the eventual meaning of Bill read; the usual view is that we first compose the meaning read'(x)(b) which contains an open variable, but this variable is then closed off by A­ abstraction. In the CG account sketched above the semantics directly yields the property rather than invoking the process of A-abstraction (note that A-abstraction itself is a type-shift rule, which in this case maps an open proposition into a closed property) . Since there is no stage in the semantic composition in which there is an open variable, this is a variable-free analysis of the semantics of extraction. There is no expression whose meaning (at any stage in the semantic composition) contains an open variable and thus must be seen as a function from assignment functions � there is also no need for a trace in the syntax to "correspond" to a variable in the semantics. What happens in the rest of the semantic composi tion depends on the precise analysis of the relative pronoun which. For now let us simply assume that which Bill read has the same meaning as Bill read ( thus, it i s the property Ndread'(x) (b)l) , and that this then intersects with the meaning of the head noun. (See Sec. 3 .4 for discussion of the meaning of which.) The idea, then, is that in an ACD case, exactly the same thing happens. In ( 1 1 ) , the "missing" meaning is simply the two-place relation read' . This function composes with did', and did'(read') in tum function composes with the (type79