British English *do*-ellipsis is invariably treated as ellipsis of VP in
the literature (e.g. Haddican 2006; Baltin 2006, 2012; Aelbrecht 2010;
Abels 2012; Thoms 2011; Thoms and Sailor 2017) with *do* located in little
*v*. I provide novel evidence that *do*-ellipsis must involve ellipsis of
the entire verbal phase (minimally vP), namely that *do*-ellipsis
obligatorily traps phase-level adverbs and the progressive auxiliary *be. *I
offer a new analysis of BrE *do-*ellipsis that treats *do *as a dummy
element that hosts stranded non-finite affixes. I show that this approach
captures a number of distributional properties of *do - *it is
ungrammatical in non-elliptical contexts, it is unacceptable under passive *be
*but not passive *get/need, *and it cannot host progressive *ing - *and
that A-extraction, local subject wh-extraction and topicalization are all
permitted under *do*-ellipsis but long distance subject wh-extraction and
object wh-extraction are not.
