This squib argues against Merchant’s (2008) analysis of voice mismatches in VP-deletion and pseudogapping by pointing out that it makes a false prediction when extended to sentences in which more than one VP-deletion operation applies.
Merchant (2008) argues that while the target of pseudogapping is VoiceP, whose head encodes the active/passive voices, VP-deletion targets VP, the complement of the Voice head.1 The targets of (i) VP-deletion and (ii) pseudogapping are schematically represented as follows:
Subj is occupied either by an external argument (YPEA) in active sentences or by an internal argument (ZPIA) in passive sentences. XPFoc in (1b) is the position for pseudogapped remnants (see Jayaseelan 1990, Lasnik 2001, Takahashi 2004).
Given that deletion is subject to morphosyntactic identity conditions as well as semantic ones (see, e.g., Sag 1976, Fiengo and May 1994, Johnson 2001, 2004...