Experimental evidence against verb-stranding VP ellipsis in Russian

This paper provides an experimental view on the debate regarding verb-stranding constructions in Russian, argued to constitute verb-stranding VP ellipsis by Gribanova (2013b) and argument ellipsis by Bailyn (2017); Landau (2020b). Two experiments are reported, aiming to test core contrasts associated with argument ellipsis, while also controlling for polarity ellipsis, another type of ellipsis able to give rise to verb-stranding constructions. The first one concerns the status of the adjunct test (Park 1997; Oku 1998), employed by both Bailyn and Landau and criticized by Simpson (2023), Kobayashi, Tanabe & Yosuke (2024). Based on an truth value judgement task in Experiment 1, we argue that the test is inconclusive, at least in the Park-Oku version: given the ability of both types of approaches to accommodate adjunct-including readings, the results that adjunct-excluding readings are not preferred for verb-stranding constructions suggest that no conclusions can be drawn from the adjunct test. Experiment 2 presents an acceptability judgement study that tests whether the semantic type of the verbal argument has an impact on the acceptability of the verb-stranding construction (see Landau 2018 for Hebrew). The results suggest that ellipsis of non-e-type arguments is significantly degraded, thus replicating the contrast reported by Landau for Hebrew. The experimental studies reported in this paper thus present novel evidence in favor of the argument ellipsis approach to Russian verb-stranding (pro Landau 2020b), while also motivating caution regarding the application of the adjunct test cross-linguistically (contra Landau 2020b).

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