VP-ellipsis 2.0
Ah, that wonderful feeling of finishing and submitting a paper; there's nothing quite like it. Today was one of those joyous days: I submitted the revised version of my chapter on VP-ellipsis for the upcoming second edition of the Blackwell Companion to Syntax (and yes, once again I missed the submission deadline by quite a margin, and once again I'm not happy about that).
I'm of course biased, but I think this version is a substantial improvement over the previous one: the cross-linguistic ellipsis data are now more tightly integrated into the rest of the paper (making their relevance and importance for the theory of ellipsis clearer), the work by Andrew Kehler is now acknowledged (not mentioning it was a substantial omission in the first version), at several points I've incorporated some additional, very recent work on VP-ellipsis (most notably two interesting papers by Philip Miller and collaborators), and of course I got to use the fantastic sentence The precise nature of the movement operation responsible for evacuating Donald Duck out of the ellipsis site is a matter of much debate.
Given that you're all very busy and can't be expected to read every single overview article that crosses your path (let alone a second version of such an article), I thought I'd give you a quick and easy wordcloud summary of the paper. This is what it looks like:
No big surprises here, except perhaps the relatively high frequency of rutabagas, madame, and spanella, but if you're familiar with what is arguably one of the most important (if not the most important) papers on VP-ellipsis, these terms too quickly fall into place.