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foldrlast Sunday at 3:07 PM1 replyview on HN

You can actually construct this using regular VP ellipsis (or possibly Right Node Raising?) in English, but it sounds weird and doesn’t convey the same meaning. So I don’t think so.

“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]

Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:

“What did you try and eat?”

* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”

There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:

*”I tried and go/went to the store yesterday.”


Replies

cwmoorelast Sunday at 3:15 PM

"What did you try but spit out?"

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