Richard Stockwell and Carson Schütze will be giving two joint practice talks for the Linguistic Society of America meeting in January.

1. Dialects “haven’t got” to be the same: modal microvariation in English
We propose a unified analysis of dialectal differences between British (Br) and North American (NoAm) English regarding ‘have-got’ – its modal scope with respect to negation and its behaviour in verb phrase ellipsis (VPE). The outright ungrammaticality of negated universal deontic ‘have-got’ in NoAm is attributed to LF reconstruction of modal ‘have’ being blocked by the overt spellout of its trace as ‘got’; whereas in Br, deontic modality resides in ‘got’ and no reconstruction problem arises. Meanwhile, the ‘have’ of ‘have-got’ survives VPE in Br, but undergoes it in NoAm where ellipsis means there is no overt ‘got’.

2. Objectless Locative Prepositions in British English
This paper clarifies the cross-dialectal landscape and challenges Griffiths & Sailor’s (2015, 2017) (G&S) A-movement analysis of objectless locative prepositions (OLPs) in British English, e.g. This film-i has monsters in __i. OLPs are restricted to in and on for southern speakers, reflecting a need for the possession to be inherent. We argue in favour of a null pronominal analysis, which still covers G&S’s A-movement data, but extends empirically to bound variable interpretations and typologically to Germanic R-pronouns.