Vehicle Change and Reconstruction in Ā-Chains

Fiengo and May (1994) argue that what they call “vehicle change,” which permits copies of names to be evaluated as pronouns with respect to interpretive principles, plays a key role in accounting for reconstruction effects in ellipsis environments. It is argued here that the alleviation of Principle C violations (“antire construction effects”), where it occurs in Ā-chains, is due not to deletion of the lower copy, as in Chomsky 1995, but to vehicle change. The introduction of vehicle change into the theory of Ā-chains is independently motivated as essential to capturing a robust adjunct/nonadjunct distinction in the reconstruction of pronoun-as-bound-variable readings that has not been discussed up to now; at the same time it predicts the class of “weakest crossover” environments.