  We develop a vector space semantics for verb phrase ellipsis with anaphora
using type-driven compositional distributional semantics based on the Lambek
calculus with limited contraction (LCC) of J\"ager (2006). Distributional
semantics has a lot to say about the statistical collocation-based meanings of
content words, but provides little guidance on how to treat function words.
Formal semantics on the other hand, has powerful mechanisms for dealing with
relative pronouns, coordinators, and the like. Type-driven compositional
distributional semantics brings these two models together. We review previous
compositional distributional models of relative pronouns, coordination and a
restricted account of ellipsis in the DisCoCat framework of Coecke et al.
(2010, 2013). We show how DisCoCat cannot deal with general forms of ellipsis,
which rely on copying of information, and develop a novel way of connecting
typelogical grammar to distributional semantics by assigning vector
interpretable lambda terms to derivations of LCC in the style of Muskens &
Sadrzadeh (2016). What follows is an account of (verb phrase) ellipsis in which
word meanings can be copied: the meaning of a sentence is now a program with
non-linear access to individual word embeddings. We present the theoretical
setting, work out examples, and demonstrate our results on a toy distributional
model motivated by data.
