Pathological questions, focus, and unacceptable ellipsis

Itai Bassi (ZAS)

Stockwell (2022) discovered a curious semantic restriction on VP ellipsis, exemplified by tautologous conditionals like *If John is wrong, then he is. He proposed that the notion of Contrast is crucial in the theory of Ellipsis licensing. I show that forcing Contrast leads to some empirical problems, and I argue instead that Stockwell’s puzzle is accounted for by an independent ban on certain semantically trivial structures. The idea is that tautologous conditionals and related constructions have a focus structure which is congruent to a Pathological Question – a question which cannot form part of a rational conversation.