Theme description
Ellipsis has been an important research topic in generative linguistics at least since Ross (1967, 1969), but with the advent of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), the interest in this topic has risen considerably. Because it is a fortiori an interface phenomenon, understanding ellipsis requires an understanding of the interaction between narrow syntax, PF, LF and the information-structural component. In other words, ellipsis is a useful tool for gaining a better understanding of how the grammar of natural language works.
Very simply put, ellipsis is the occurrence of meaning without sound. A first important question to ask is how much syntax is involved in deriving this meaning. Roughly speaking, there are three types of proposals dealing with this issue. A first one takes the ellipsis site to be a fully-fledged syntactic structure that is deleted (or not pronounced) at PF (i.e. PF-deletion; cf. Ross 1969; Sag 1980; Hankamer & Sag 1976, Sag & Hankamer 1984; Tomioka 1999, 2001; Merchant 2001; Johnson 1996, 2001; Lasnik 1999a, 1999b, 2001). According to a type of second analysis the ellipsis site does not contain any internal structure, but is a null pronoun (or proform). The meaning is derived from the antecedent, either parallel to how overt pronouns are interpreted (Wasow 1972; Shopen 1972; Hardt 1993, 1999; Lobeck 1995; Depiante 2000) or by copying the antecedent into the ellipsis site at LF (i.e. LF copy; cf. Fiengo & May 1994; Chung et al. 1995; Wilder 1997; Beavers & Sag 2004; Fortin 2007). A third account assumes there is nothing at all in the position of the missing material (Ginzburg & Sag 2000; Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). Recently, the debate on the presence or absence of internal structure has been extended to overt pronouns. Elbourne (2008) proposes that overt pronouns are definite descriptions underlyingly, such that when a noun undergoes NP-ellipsis, its determiner is spelled out as a pronoun (cf. Postal 1969). This approach turns the reasoning of the null proform analysis of ellipsis on its head: instead of treating the ellipsis site as a (null) pronoun, it treats (overt) pronouns as ellipsis sites (cf. also Baltin & Van Craenenbroeck 2008).
A second central question in the study of ellipsis involves the relation between the ellipsis site and its antecedent. Merchant (2001), following Rooth (1992) and Schwarzschild (1999), proposes that an ellipsis site has to be e-given: the (non-focus-marked part of the) antecedent must entail the (non-focus-marked part of the) ellipsis site and vice versa in order for ellipsis to be recoverable. However, recent works claim that a purely semantic recoverability condition is not sufficient and that ellipsis requires syntactic isomorphism between antecedent and ellipsis site, cf. Lasnik (1995); Johnson (2001); Merchant (2007, 2008) (see also Fiengo & May 1994; Pullum 2000; Fox 1999, 2000; Sauerland 2004; Hardt 2004, 2005 and van Craenenbroeck 2009 for discussion).
Apart from the conditions on the antecedent (i.e. the recoverability requirement), ellipsis is subject to a syntactic licensing condition: even when the ellipsis site is recoverable from the context, it can only occur in a specific set of syntactic environments. Lobeck (1995), for instance, argues that VP ellipsis requires strong agreement on the inflectional head and claims that English, but not German or French, exhibits this kind of agreement. Merchant (2001) on the other hand, captures the fact that ellipsis requires a licensing head by positing an ellipsis feature on certain heads, allowing them to leave their complement unpronounced. A similar analysis is proposed in Aelbrecht (2009), who argues that ellipsis is licensed by an Agree relation between an ellipsis feature and the ellipsis licensing head.
For the fourth Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics we welcome papers on any topic related to the issues raised above.
We are pleased to announce that the following invited speakers have accepted to give a talk at BCGL4:
Daniel Hardt (Copenhagen Business School)
Jason Merchant (University of Chicago)
References
Aelbrecht, L. (2009). You have the right to remain silent: the licensing of ellipsis. PhD Dissertation, HUBrussel.
Baltin, M. & J. van Craenenbroeck (2008). On becoming a pronoun. Towards a unified theory of ellipsis. Paper presented at the 10thCUNY/SUNY/NYU/YU-miniconference, November 2008.
Chomsky, N. (1999). Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework. In: MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 15. MITWPL: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Chomsky, N. (2000). Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework. In: R. Martin, D. Michaels & J. Uriagereka, Step by Step. Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honour of Howard Lasnik, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 89-155.
Beavers, J. & I. Sag (2004). Coordinate Ellipsis and Apparent Non-Constituent Coordination. In: S. Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the HPSG04 Conference. CSLI Publications: Stanford, 48-69.
Chung, S., W. Ladusaw & J. McCloskey (1995). Sluicing and Logical Form. In: Natural Language Semantics 3, 239-282.
Craenenbroeck, J. van (2009). Ellipsis and accommodation. The (morphological) case of sluicing. Paper presented at MIT, April 3.
Culicover, P. & R. Jackendoff (2005). Simpler Syntax. Oxford University Press: New York.
Depiante, M. (2000). The syntax of deep and surface anaphora: a study of null complement anaphora and stripping/bare argument ellipsis. PhD dissertation,University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Elbourne, P. (2008). Ellipsis sites as definite descriptions. In: Linguistic Inquiry 39, 191-220.
Fiengo, R. & R. May (1994). Indices and identity. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fortin, C. (2007). Indonesian sluicing and verb phrase ellipsis: description and explanation in a Minimalist framework. PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Fox, D. (1999). Focus, parallelism and accommodation. Paper presented at SALT 9.
Fox, D. (2000). Economy and semantic interpretation. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
Ginzburg, J. & I. Sag (2000). Interrogative investigations: The form, meaning, and use of English interrogatives. Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Hankamer, J. & I. A. Sag (1976). Deep and surface anaphora. Linguistic Inquiry 7, 391–428.
Hardt, D. (1993). Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Form, Meaning and Processing. PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Hardt, D. (1999). Dynamic interpretation of verb phrase ellipsis. In: Linguistics and Philosophy 22. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 185-219.
Hardt, D. (2004). Ellipsis resolution and inference. In: Acta Linguistica.
Hardt, D. (2005). Inference, ellipsis and deaccenting. Paper presented at Amsterdam Colloquium.
Johnson, K. (1996). When verb phrases go missing. Glot International 2:5, 3-9.
Johnson, K. (2001). What VP-ellipsis can do, and what it can’t, but not why. In: M. Baltin & C. Collins (eds.), The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory. Blackwell, 439-479.
Lasnik, H. (1995). Verbal Morphology: Syntactic Structures Meets the Minimalist program. In: H. Campos & P. Kempchinsky (eds.), Evolution and Revolution in Linguistic Theory. Georgetown University Press: Georgetown.
Lasnik, H. (1999a). Pseudogapping Puzzles: S. Lappin & E. Benmamoun (eds.). Fragments: studies in ellipsis and gapping. OUP. 141-174.
Lasnik, H. (1999b). On feature strength: Three minimalist approaches to overt movement. Linguistic Inquiry 30, 197-217.
Lasnik, H. (2001). When can you save a structure by destroying it? M. Kim & U. Strauss (eds.). Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 31. GLSA. 301-320.
Lobeck, A. (1995). Ellipsis. Functional heads, licensing and identification. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Merchant, J. (2001).The syntax of silence. Sluicing, islands and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Merchant, J. (2007). Voice and ellipsis. Ms. University of Chicago.
Merchant, J. (2008). An asymmetry in voice mismatches in VP-ellipsis and pseudogapping. In: Linguistic Inquiry 39:1, 169-179.
Postal, P. (1969). “On So-Called Pronouns In English”, in David Reibel & Sanford Schane, eds., Modern Studies In English, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,Prentice-Hall, pp.201-224
Pullum, G. (2000). *Hankamer was! In: S. Chung, J. McCloskey & N. Sanders (eds.), Jorge Hankamer Webfest. Available online at http://ling.ucsc.edu/Jorge/.
Rooth, M. (1992). Ellipsis Redundancy and Reduction Redundancy. In: S. Berman & A. Hestvik (eds.), Proceedings of the Stuttgarter Ellipsis workshop. Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereichs 340, 29.
Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on Variables in Syntax. PhD Dissertation, MIT (appeared as Ross (1986). Infinite Syntax. Ablex Publishing Corporation: Norwood, New Jersey).
Ross, J.R. (1969). Guess who?. In: R. Binnick, A. Davidson, G. Green & J. Morgan (eds.), Papers from the fifth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago LinguisticSociety, 252-286.
Sag, I. A. (1980). Deletion and Logical Form. Garland Press.
Sag, I. A. & J. Hankamer (1984). Toward a theory of anaphoric processing. Linguistics and Philosophy 7, 325–345.
Sauerland, U. (2004). The interpretation of traces. In: Natural Language Semantics 12, 63-127.
Schlangen, D. (2003). A Coherence-Based Approach to the Interpretation of Non-Sentential Utterances in Dialogue. PhD Dissertation, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Schwartzschild, Roger (1999). Givenness, AvoidF, and Other Constraints on the Placement of Accent. In: Natural Language Semantics 7, 141-177.
Shopen, T. (1972). A generative theory of ellipsis. PhD Dissertation, UCLA.
Tomioka, S. (1999). A sloppy identity puzzle. Natural Language Semantics 7, 217-241.
Tomioka, S. (2001). On a certain scope asymmetry in VP Ellipsis contexts. C. Rohrer, A. Roßduetscher & H. Kamp (eds.). Linguistic form and its computation. CSLI Publications. 183-204.
Wasow, T. (1972). Anaphoric relations in English. PhD Dissertation, MIT.
Wilder, C. (1997). Some properties of ellipsis in coordination. In: A. Alexiadou & T. A. Hall (eds.), Studies in Universal Grammar and typological variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 59-107.