Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
The Semantics of Ellipsis
By Paul Elbourne
There are four phenomena that are particularly troublesome for theories of ellipsis: the existence of sloppy readings when the relevant pronouns cannot possibly be bound; an ellipsis being resolved in such a way that an ellipsis site in the antecedent is not understood in the way it was there; an ellipsis site drawing material from two or more separate antecedents; and ellipsis with no linguistic antecedent. These cases are accounted for by means of a new theory that involves copying syntactically incomplete antecedent material and an analysis of silent VPs and NPs that makes them into higher order definite descriptions that can be bound into.
Keywords: VP-ellipsis, NP-deletion, definite descriptions
Source: Semantics Archive
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 00:01 BST
Updated: Wednesday, 14 September 2005 00:27 BST
