Verb Phrase Ellipsis

Current theories assume that all ellipsis phenomena can be licensed by a feature occupying a preceding functional head (Lobeck 1995, Merchant 1999, 2004). In this paper, however, I show that feature-based treatments cannot account for licensing of verb phrase and noun phrase ellipsis (predicate ellipsis) in American English and African American English (AAE) through evidence that these functional heads must be phonologically overt. AAE is particularly important to establish this generalization due to the fact that production of auxiliary be and the possessive ’s morpheme is typically optional preceding a full predicate, yet experimental evidence from this paper confirms that this optionality disappears in elliptical contexts. The analysis proposed here entails that predicate ellipsis, inwhich overtness is required, and clausal ellipsis,wherein the head said to license ellipsis is necessarily silent, are subject to different licensing conditions.

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This book analyses ‘incomplete sentences’ in languages that utilise distinctively agglutinative components in their morphology. In the grammars of the languages dealt with in this book, there are certain types of sentences which are variously referred to as ‘elliptical sentences’ (Turkish eksiltili cümleler), ‘incomplete sentences’ (Uzbek to‘liqsiz gaplar), ‘cutoff sentences’ (Turkish kesik cümleler), etc., for which the grammarians provide elaborated semantic and syntactic analyses. The current work attempts to present an alternative approach for the analysis of such sentences. The distribution of morphemes in incomplete sentences is examined closely, based on which a system of analysis that can handle a variety of incomplete sentences in an integrated manner is proposed from a morphological point of view. The linguistic data are taken from Turkish, Uzbek, Japanese, and (Bukharan) Tajik.

The present study is an attempt to account for non-sentential utterance (NSU) production without assuming the existence of a 'syntactically full sentence' for every NSU. The model for NSU production that derives from this study has the following four advantages over the popular 'constituent-omission' model: It 1) accounts for the production of NSUs that native speakers variably 'reconstruct', 2) explains why in certain contexts pro-drop cannot occur in languages that have morphologically marked subject-verb agreement 3) models the production of NSUs without devising separate production processes for 'ellipses' and 'fragments', and 4) predicts what constituents have to be present in a given NSU. It also keeps the involvement of syntax in NSU production to a minimum.

This study examines whether the second language acquisition (L2A) of syntactic properties at the interfaces is problematic for L2 learners. English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) was tested as an interface property which involves feature interpretability. Two subtle contrasts of VPE at different grammar-internal interfaces were examined: (a) copula be and lexical verb ellipsis at the syntax–lexicon interface (*John is here, and Mary will too vs. John slept, and Mary will too), and (b) progressive be and perfective have stranding at the syntax–semantics interface (*John slept, and Mary was too vs. Peter saw your parents last week, but he hasn’t since). Unlike (a), the contrast in (b) requires identifying (un)interpretable features on -ing and -en to recover the semantics of the elided material. Since Saudi Arabic does not license VPE, (very-)advanced English L2 speakers whose first language (L1) is Saudi Arabic were tested. The results from a bimodal timed acceptability judgment task showed they were more target-like on the contrast at the syntax–lexicon interface than they were on the syntax–semantics interface. They particularly deviated from target-like judgments on have stranding which requires recognizing the perfective uninterpretable feature on -en. These results suggest selective vulnerability at grammar-internal interfaces whenever uninterpretable features are involved.

This paper investigates the use of ellipsis diagnostics to determine whether deletion has occurred in as-parentheticals. As-parentheticals look as though they contain verb phrase ellipsis, but Potts (2002) argues that they do not. A number of diagnostics that have been used to distinguish ellipsis from null pro-forms are discussed in some detail. These diagnostics show that the deletion process in as-parentheticals is distinct from canonical verb phrase ellipsis. Instead, it shares properties with comparative deletion (Kennedy 2002). Thus, I argue that once a broader range of facts is considered, we need to include some manner of deletion in the derivation as-parentheticals.

In this paper, I investigate the syntax of inverting as-parentheticals, a subclass of parenthetical as-clause that is anaphorically dependent on a previously uttered predicate that, in addition, exhibits properties of certain kinds of discourse inversion identified by Birner (1994). I argue that these constructions contain deletion, following recent work on predicate as-parentheticals. I go on to show that some of the unusual syntactic properties in inverting as-parentheticals are shared with other sorts of discourse inversion constructions (as seen in recent work by Bern Samko), and that these properties can be explained if we provide the constructions similar derivations.

It has proven difficult to understand what drives apparent wh-movement in languages with multiple sluicing that lack multiple wh-movement. Many authors (including Abels and Dayal (2017), Gärtner (2002), and Richards 2001) propose that the appearance of multiple wh-remnants in these languages is the result of an interaction of covert wh-chains with ellipsis: Ellipsis of the tail of a covert wh-movement chain forces pronunciation of a higher link in the chain, deriving exceptional wh-movement. Although this makes for an elegant analysis of multiple sluicing, I argue in this short paper that the assumptions underlying the analysis appear to make unwelcome predictions about wh-movement out of verb phrase ellipsis sites. Verb phrase ellipsis should motivate exceptional multiple wh-movement, but it does not appear to do so.

We present conditions under which verb phrases are elided based on a corpus of positive and negative examples. Factor that affect verb phrase ellipsis include: the distance between antecedent and ellipsis site, the syntactic relation between antecedent and ellipsis site, and the presence or absence of adjuncts. Building on these results, we examine where in the generation architecture a trainable algorithm for VP ellipsis should be located. We show that the best performance is achieved when the trainable module is located after the ...

Theories differ as to how people recover the meaning of verb-phrase (VP) ellipsis. According to the syntactic account, people reproduce the syntactic structure of the antecedent during the processing of VP ellipsis. This account thus predicts that the ellipsis site contains syntactic information. Using the structural priming paradigm, we found that, in Mandarin, an ellipsis prime (a double-object or prepositional-object dative antecedent plus a VP ellipsis) was less effective in priming than a full-form prime sentence (the same antecedent plus the full-form equivalent of the VP ellipsis) but behaved similarly to a baseline prime (the same antecedent plus a neutral sentence). The result thus suggests that syntactic structure is not reproduced at the ellipsis site and supports the semantic account in which VP ellipsis is interpreted via a semantic representation.

Predicate which-appositives (PWAs) are a class of nonrestrictive, parenthetical relative clauses that take as their antecedents predicate-denoting material in the spine of a clause. PWAs contain a gap, and it is difficult to tell whether this gap is derived by a deletion operation like verb phrase ellipsis or by wh-movement. Indeed, diagnostics meant to distinguish these two possibilities provide evidence that both are correct. In order to remedy the apparent conundrum, I draw on recent work on Danish verbal anaphora. I argue that the VP itself undergoes A'-movement and that the relative operator which is inserted post-syntactically in place of the VP, replacing its phonological material. This post-syntactic operation explains why there appears to be phonological deletion involved in the derivation of PWAs while still allowing the A'-movement properties of the construction to be explained.