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Lobke Aelbrecht - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Predicate Ellipsis (Including VP-Ellipsis and pseudogapping)
2020Co-Authors: Lobke Aelbrecht, William HarwoodAbstract:This chapter discusses the phenomenon of predicate Ellipsis, which covers several types of Ellipsis targeting the clausal predicate. The best-known type is VP-Ellipsis (VPE), but there is also pseudogapping, and two lesser-known types, namely Modal Complement Ellipsis and British English do. For each type the basic properties and main research questions are discussed. Extra attention is given to the question of what is actually elided, and it turns out that VP-Ellipsis deletes more than just the verb phrase, as does pseudogapping. Although this phenomenon is best studied in English, VP-Ellipsis also occurs in other languages, where it appears as so-called V-stranding VPE: the main verb undergoes movement when it is finite, allowing it to move out of the Ellipsis site and survive Ellipsis.
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Modal complement Ellipsis: VP Ellipsis in Dutch?
2020Co-Authors: Lobke AelbrechtAbstract:Although the literature commonly assumes Dutch not to display VP Ellipsis (VPE), this paper presents Dutch data reminiscent of VPE in English. In particular, the infinitival complement of a root modal can be elided. This modal complement Ellipsis (MCE) differs from English VPE, however, in not allowing objects to extract out of the Ellipsis site. Therefore, one might take MCE to involve a null proform. Since subjects can extract, however, I argue that MCE involves deletion of syntactic structure. I claim that the Ellipsis site is sent to PF for non-pronunciation as soon as the Ellipsis licensing head is merged. This implies that extraction is only possible to a position between the licensor and the Ellipsis site. I account for the contrast between Dutch and English by showing that in MCE only the subject has such an escape hatch, while English VPE allows all extraction due to an intervening phase edge.
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Dutch modal complement Ellipsis
2020Co-Authors: Lobke AelbrechtAbstract:A phenomenon like this can be analyzed in at least three possible ways. We can see it as deletion of a fully specified verb phrase, as has been claimed to be the case in EnglishVP Ellipsis (VPE; cf. Ross 1969; Johnson 1996, 2001;Merchant 2001, 2007 ); or as involving a null verbal proform (see Lobeck 1995, Depiante 2000). Or, more radically, we could claim that the modal does not have a complement at all, i.e. that it can be used intransitively (cf. Napoli 1985). Although reminiscent of VP Ellipsis in English, the Dutch data differ from the English counterpart. More importantly, they differ from English VPE when it comes to certain arguments in favour of a deletion approach. For instance, they do not allow for A’-extraction out of the Ellipsis site. Therefore, at first sight it seems that theDutchMCE Ellipsis site does not contain any syntactic structure, unlike in English, and that these data have to be analyzed in a different way. However, a closer look reveals that there must indeed be a syntactic VP structure in Dutch MCE: A-extraction out of the Ellipsis site, for instance, is allowed in bothDutch and English. In this paper I argue that Dutch MCE involves deletion of a fully specified structure, just like English. The contrast between the languages is derived from the difference in licensing head and Ellipsis site. I claim that the Ellipsis site is sent off to Spell-Out for non-pronunciation (see Gengel 2007) when the licensor is merged. In other words, to escape Ellipsis a phrase has to
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To Be Or Not To Be Elided: VP Ellipsis revisited
Lingua, 2014Co-Authors: Lobke Aelbrecht, William HarwoodAbstract:The main question that this paper addresses is: what happens to non-finite auxiliaries under English VP Ellipsis (VPE)? Do they remain overt like finite auxiliaries, or do they disappear together with lexical verbs? Akmajian and Wasow (1975) and Sag (1976) observed the following pattern: non-finite have always stays overt, being is obligatorily elided, and be and been are optionally elided. We provide an analysis for this pattern. As preliminaries for our account we follow Chomsky (1993) and Lasnik (1995b) in assuming that English auxiliaries carry uninterpretable inflectional features which force the auxiliary to raise to the relevant inflectional head for feature checking at PF. As we argue that VPE includes the progressive projections in the Ellipsis site, but nothing higher, the have and being data automatically fall out: have is base-generated outside the Ellipsis site, so is never elided, whilst being's landing site is inside the Ellipsis site, so being is always elided. For be and been, which are base-generated in the Ellipsis site and raise out of it to get their inflectional features checked, we take an optional raising approach: in non-elliptical sentences raising is obligatory, otherwise the derivation crashes at PF because of unchecked features. Ellipsis contexts, on the other hand, provide the option of not raising for be and been, because Ellipsis then deletes be and been in their base positions, along with their unchecked features, avoiding the PF violation. We extend this account to other phenomena, such as VP fronting, pseudo-clefts and predicate inversion.
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Modal complement Ellipsis
2012Co-Authors: Lobke AelbrechtAbstract:Although the literature commonly assumes Dutch not to display VP Ellipsis (VPE), this paper presents Dutch data reminiscent of VPE in English. In particular, the infinitival complement of a root modal can be elided. This modal complement Ellipsis (MCE) differs from English VPE, however, in not allowing objects to extract out of the Ellipsis site. Therefore, one might take MCE to involve a null proform. Since subjects can extract, however, I argue that MCE involves deletion of syntactic structure. I claim that the Ellipsis site is sent to PF for non-pronunciation as soon as the Ellipsis licensing head is merged. This implies that extraction is only possible to a position between the licensor and the Ellipsis site. I account for the contrast between Dutch and English by showing that in MCE only the subject has such an escape hatch, while English VPE allows all extraction due to an intervening phase edge.
Jason Merchant - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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structural priming in production through silence an investigation of verb phrase Ellipsis and null complement anaphora
Glossa, 2019Co-Authors: Ming Xiang, Julian Grove, Jason MerchantAbstract:There are two common competing conceptions of how Ellipsis can be resolved: in the first, Ellipsis is resolved by constructing unpronounced syntactic representations at the Ellipsis site; in the second, Ellipsis can be resolved by consulting the semantic/discourse information present in the antecedent, without the mediation of any syntax at all. In four syntactic priming experiments, we examine whether resolving English VP Ellipsis and Null Complement Anaphora involves accessing the syntactic representations, or only the semantic representations, of the antecedent clause. Our findings suggest both VPE and Null Complement Anaphora can trigger structural priming effects, but the conditions under which they trigger priming are different. These results have implications for both theories of structural priming mechanism and theories of Ellipsis resolution.
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gender mismatches under nominal Ellipsis
Lingua, 2014Co-Authors: Jason MerchantAbstract:Masculine/feminine pairs of human-denoting nouns in Greek fall into three distinct classes under predicative Ellipsis: those that license Ellipsis of their counterpart regardless of gender, those that only license Ellipsis of a same-gendered noun, and those in which the masculine noun of the pair licenses Ellipsis of the feminine version, but not vice versa. The three classes are uniform in disallowing any gender mismatched ellipses in argument uses, however. This differential behavior of gender in nominal Ellipsis can be captured by positing that human-denoting nouns in Greek, while syntactically and morphological uniform in showing a masculine/feminine contrast, do not all encode this contrast in their semantics. Under a semantic identity theory of Ellipsis, the attested variation in nominal ellipses in Greek is posited to derive from the fact that nominal Ellipsis has two possible sources: a nominal constituent can be elided (true Ellipsis), or a null nominal proform can be used (model-theoretic anaphora).
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Voice and Ellipsis
Linguistic Inquiry, 2013Co-Authors: Jason MerchantAbstract:Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of Ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts appear to indicate that the identity relation in Ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VPEllipsis facts fall into place if the head that determines voice is external to the phrase being elided, here argued to be vP; such an account can only be framed in approaches that allow syntactic features to be separated from the heads on which they are morphologically realized. Alternatives to this syntactic, articulated view of Ellipsis and voice either undergenerate or overgenerate.
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fragments and Ellipsis
Linguistics and Philosophy, 2005Co-Authors: Jason MerchantAbstract:Fragmentary utterances such as ‘short’ answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to Ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A′-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and Ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an Ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena.
Zhou Changle - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Research on Chinese Ellipsis recovering based on discourse representation theory
17th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI'05), 2005Co-Authors: Li Shaozi, Li Wang, Zhou ChangleAbstract:This paper presents our research work on Chinese Ellipsis recovering based on discourse representation theory (DRT). From various perspectives, our work focuses on how to construct the Chinese DRT and the semantic model. Then it proposes an Ellipsis recovering model based on discourse, which selects the most suitable one and fill in the syntactic Ellipsis and possible semantic Ellipsis. The simulated results show some advantages of the proposed approach based on DRT and potential applications in Chinese oral system and discourse machine understanding
Daniel Hardt - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Ellipsis and Computational Linguistics
The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis, 2018Co-Authors: Daniel HardtAbstract:This chapter considers approaches to Ellipsis within computational linguistics. It begins with the structure of the Ellipsis site—a topic that has received little attention in computational linguistics. There are two prominent accounts of the recovery of Ellipsis: that of Lappin and McCord (1990) and Dalrymple et al. (1991). The topic of licensing follows. This topic has not been directly addressed in the computational literature, but the chapter covers two related issues of direct computational interest: the identification and generation of Ellipsis occurrences. This is followed by three additional topics: identifying the antecedent, dialogue, and text mining.
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Ellipsis resolution and inference
Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 2015Co-Authors: Daniel HardtAbstract:AbstractY Since Webber (1978) it has been known that Ellipsis interpretation sometimes requires inference. However, the literature on Ellipsis has largely Ignored this: prominent accounts such as (Sag (1976); Williams (1977); Dalrymple et al. (1991); Fiengo and May (1994) and Hardt (1999)) provide no mechanism for inference in Ellipsis resolution. The proposal in Rooth (1992) is an exception to this: Rooth gives several examples in which inference is required in Ellipsis interpretation. He argues that Ellipsis is subject to two different kinds of licensing conditions: an Ellipsis-specific identity condition and a general focus-background condition. Rooth argues that the focus-background condition interacts with inference, while the Ellipsis-specific identity condition does not. Rooth does not propose any constraints on inference. This presents an evident problem of overgeneration, since it is possible to come up with some chain of inferences to license virtually any interpretation of an elliptical expression.
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Ellipsis and the Structure of Discourse
Journal of Semantics, 2004Co-Authors: Daniel Hardt, Maribel RomeroAbstract:It is generally assumed that Ellipsis requires certain parallelism between the clause containing the ellips is and some antecedent clause. We argue that the parallelism requirement generated by Ellipsis must be applied in accordance with discourse structure: a matching antecedent clause must be found that locally c-commands the clause containing the Ellipsis in the discourse tree. We show that the claim makes several correct predictions concerning the interpretation of Ellipsis, both in terms of the selection of the antecedent (in Sluicing and Verb Phrase Ellipsis), and in terms of the possible readings given a particular antecedent (in the “many-clause” puzzle and in Antecedent-Contained Deletion).
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Discourse parallelism, Ellipsis, and ambiguity
Journal of Semantics, 2001Co-Authors: Nicholas Asher, Daniel Hardt, Joan BusquetsAbstract:In this paper we combine a simple recovery mechanism for Ellipsis with a general, discourse account of parallelism to account for a variety of phenomena concerning Ellipsis, including Sag's wide scope puzzle and complex examples concerning sloppy identity. Our recovery mechanism requires an identity of logical structure between the recovered material and antecedent in the Ellipsis. The recovered material and the antecedent are then interpreted independently in their respective contexts, subject only to the general discourse constraints on parallelism. These constraints give a uniform account of parallelism facts, whether or not there is Ellipsis.
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verb phrase Ellipsis form meaning and processing
1993Co-Authors: Daniel HardtAbstract:The central claim of this dissertation is that an elliptical VP is a proform. This claim has two primary consequences: first, the elliptical VP can have no internal syntactic structure. Second, the interpretation of VP Ellipsis must be governed by the same general conditions governing other proforms, such as pronouns. The basic condition governing the interpretation of a proform is that it must be semantically identified with its antecedent. A computational model is described in which this identification is mediated by store and retrieve operations defined with respect to a discourse model. Because VP Ellipsis is treated on a par with other proforms, the ambiguity arising from "sloppy identity" becomes epiphenomenal, resulting from the fact that the store and retrieve operations are freely ordered. A primary argument for the proform theory of VP Ellipsis concerns syntactic constraints on variables within the antecedent. I examine many different types of variables, including reflexives, reciprocals, negative polarity items, and wh-traces. In all these cases, syntactic constraints are not respected under Ellipsis. This indicates that the relation governing VP Ellipsis is semantic rather than syntactic. In further support of the proform theory, I show that there is a striking similarity in the antecedence possibilities for VP Ellipsis and those for pronouns. Two computer programs demonstrate the claims of this dissertation. One program implements the semantic copying required to resolve VP Ellipsis, demonstrating the correct set of possible readings for the examples of interest. The second program selects the antecedent for a VP Ellipsis occurrence. This program has been tested on several hundred examples of VP Ellipsis, automatically collected from corpora.
Joanna Nykiel - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Preposition stranding and Ellipsis alternation
English Language and Linguistics, 2016Co-Authors: Joanna NykielAbstract:Ellipsis alternation refers here to the alternation between two kinds of Ellipsis remnants whose correlates are prepositional phrases. One kind of remnant includes the preposition hosted by its correlate and the other doesn't. This alternation is now known to be cross-linguistically widespread although it was originally assumed to be banned in languages without preposition stranding under wh-movement. I argue that there is a nonsyntactic relationship between Ellipsis alternation and preposition stranding that helps explain the availability and distribution of both types of remnants in terms of general performance preferences. Two pieces of corpus evidence from English are offered in support of this argument. The first piece of evidence reveals that the content of a remnant and its correlate affects Ellipsis alternation both in languages without preposition stranding and in English. The second piece of evidence shows that the availability of preposition stranding in English nonelliptical clauses supports the use of prepositionless remnants via structural persistence, that is, reuse of syntactic structure found in antecedent clauses. These data lead me to conclude that Ellipsis alternation is subject to a stronger processing constraint in English than in languages without preposition stranding.
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Preposition omission in English Ellipsis
LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts, 2012Co-Authors: Joanna NykielAbstract:The availability of preposition omission in Ellipsis is assumed to follow from the possibility of preposition stranding in corresponding non-elliptical clauses (Merchant 2001). To test this assumption I sampled 409 Ellipsis remnants from three corpora of American English, and developed generalized mixed-effects models of preposition omission in Ellipsis. The results show that preposition omission is, among others, sensitive to gradient constraints independently found to influence preposition placement in interrogative clauses, without being correlated with the possibility of preposition stranding. This finding challenges evidence for syntactic parallels between elliptical constructions and their nonelliptical counterparts, and hence, for deletion-based approaches to Ellipsis.