Abstract While VP-fronting in English has various properties that are generally taken to be hallmarks of A¯ $$\overline A $$ -movement, other properties of the construction militate against an analysis in terms of displacement of VP to the clausal periphery. Such an analysis falls short of providing principled answers to the questions of why the trace of VP-fronting must be nominal, why certain kinds of morphological mismatches between the fronted VP and its trace are possible, why fronting of remnant VPs is impossible, and others. This article proposes an analysis of English VP-fronting – plausibly extending to English ’topicalization’ in general – based on the observation that the construction shares these non-movement properties with left-dislocation of VP in German. Connectivity effects, on such an approach, are the result of ellipsis. By assimilating VP-fronting to dislocation, the analysis furnishes principled explanations for the striking asymmetries between English-type VP-fronting (dislocation) and German-type VP-fronting ( A¯ $$\overline A $$ -movement).

中文翻译：

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副总裁：行动与错位

摘要尽管英语中的VP前沿具有各种特性，通常被视为A $$ \ overline A $$运动的标志，但该结构的其他特性不利于分析VP向子句外围的位移。这样的分析没有为以下问题提供原则性的答案：为什么VP前沿的痕迹必须是名义的，为什么前沿VP及其痕迹之间可能存在某些形态上的不匹配，为什么不可能对残余VP进行前沿等等。本文提出了一种分析，即英语VP前沿（通常可以扩展到英语的“主题化”）是基于这样的观察，即该构造与德语中VP的左错位共享这些非运动特性。在这种方法上，连接性的影响是省略号的结果。