An experimental syntax approach to British English do ellipsis

Abstract Researchers have reported that British English do (also called ‘propredicate do ’) is permitted in only a subset of the syntactic configurations that permit standard VP / post-auxiliary ellipsis in English. Problematically, the reliability of the acceptability judgment data underlying all prior generative research on British English do ellipsis is not guaranteed. This situation transpires because these data were collected informally, which is not the most suitable method for collecting data on elliptical phenomena. In this paper, I report the results of eight judgment experiments conducted using the experimental syntax method, which can return reliable results on elliptical phenomena. These results show that, while the distribution of British English do ellipsis is indeed more restricted than standard post-auxiliary ellipsis, the do ellipsis site is permeable to all forms of syntactic movement from within it, contrary to reports in the literature. The results obtained are compatible with a simple syntactic analysis that states that do cannot select for elliptical VPs headed by a verb that can move to T. Eliding a VP in do ellipsis therefore does not render that VP opaque to further syntactic operations, which weakens the empirical support for proposals that treat ellipsis sites as phase-like objects.