The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all. (...) -/- Editor's comment: To find the contribution, please go to item 16 of the URL, which contains the full text. Professor Merchant has permitted this. (shrink)

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', as (...) well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and di fferent flavors of `therefore'. (shrink)

It is a hallmark of natural language use that the way we talk about something reflects how it is represented in the mind of our conversation partner. This thesis studies the use and cognitive processing of referring expressions like one in comparison with other expression types in spoken Danish. The cognitive status of referents in other people’s minds can be understood in terms or referential givenness. The common view of givenness is that it constitutes a one-dimensional scale or continuum of (...) cognitive prominence. In opposition to this view, the present thesis assumes that givenness is partly composed of the dynamic referential features of accessibility and identifiability, two fundamental dimensions of givenness that are essentially free to vary independently of each other. A small corpus study of spoken Danish shows no differences between referent accessibility in indefinite and definite pronominal forms. Furthermore, referents of definite and indefinite forms clearly tend to differ with respect to identifiability. An experimental eye-tracking study provides evidence that there is no difference in the timecourse of the initiation of anaphoric reference resolution processes between expressions differing in definiteness marking and lexical explicitness. It is also shown, however, that the referential commitment of pronouns---both indefinite and definite---lag behind that of full noun phrases. Finally, an explorative dyadic eye-tracking study suggests that the moment-by-moment activation of referents in both speaker and listener vary as a function of lexical explicitness in indefinite forms. This result is consistent with the assumption that givenness differences associated with accessibility marking generalize to indefinite forms. All of these findings provide support for the new view of givenness proposed in the thesis. The dyadic eye-tracking methodology eventually arrived at in the thesis proves that it is possible to study language processing in unscripted, relatively natural dialogue in both speaker and listener simultaneously, and that interesting results can be obtained that are well worth the effort. (shrink)

Despite the attention that various forms of ellipsis have received inthe literature, the conditions under which a representation of anutterance may serve as a suitable referent for interpreting subsequentelliptical forms remain poorly understood. This fundamental questionremains as a point of contention, particularly because there are datato support various conflicting approaches that attempt to characterizethese conditions within a single module of language processing. Weshow a previously unnoticed pattern in VP-ellipsis data with respectto the type of coherence relation extant between the antecedentand (...) elided clauses. This pattern is explained by an account of howellipsis resolution processes interact with the inference processesunderlying the establishment of these relations. The analysis alsoexplains a similar yet distinct pattern in gapping constructions whichare not accounted for by purely syntactic approaches. Finally, wediscuss event reference and compare the resulting account to thedichotomy of types of anaphora posited by HanSag. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated withcompositionality. This will become particularly clear in the context of incomplete expressions. Our approach takes as a point of departure total freedom ofinterpretation in combination with the parallel application (...) of soft constraints on possible interpretations. These constraints can be contextual, intonational or syntactic in nature. The integration of pragmatic andsyntactic/semantic information in a system of ranked constraints is proposed to correctly derive the optimal interpretations in cases of nominal anaphorization, determiner quantification and elliptical comparatives. (shrink)

I argue that the debate on the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics, at least as it pertains to pragmatic free enrichment, needs to be better grounded empirically. Often, only a reduced set of facts from English is used to substantiate claims regarding pragmatic free enrichment. But considering a reduced set of facts from a single language can only afford limited (and, sometimes, wrong) results, because we can merely see whatever this one language chooses to express. Two cases studies (...) are presented: adjectival fragments, and implicit indefinite objects. A grammatical analysis is defended for them. (shrink)

This paper presents the treatment of anaphora in generative grammar. After a broad review of of the different theories covered under the term, it provides an overview of the history of the treatment of anaphora in generative grammar. It then discusses Ariel’s theory of accessibility and shows how it can account for the choice of some of the anaphoric expressions provided in the text. In a final section, the paper presents the author’s recent work on the choice between verbal anaphors. (...) It is shown that accessibility can account for some aspects of the choice but is not sufficient. Further constraints on the choice are proposed in terms of the notion of Question Under Discussion, for which experimental evidence is adduced. (shrink)

This paper argues that verb phrase ellipsis requires contrast. The central observation is that ellipsis is ungrammatical in tautologous conditionals; e.g., *_If John wins, then he does_. Ellipsis is correctly ruled out by a focus-based theory of ellipsis (Rooth 1992a, b ), but one that crucially imports focus’s requirement for contrast: an elliptical constituent must have an antecedent that is not merely an alternative to it, but a ‘proper’ alternative. An explanation in terms of contrast failure proves superior to alternative (...) explanations in terms of triviality and matching form. Showing as much catalogues what counts for contrast in ellipsis, encompassing negation, questions, and intensionality. Subjecting ellipsis to a contrast requirement is in direct conflict with the traditional analysis of MaxElide effects (Takahashi and Fox 2005 ), favouring alternative explanations (e.g., Jacobson 2019a, b ), perhaps in terms of contrast itself (Griffiths 2019 ). Overall, this paper establishes that contrast has explanatory power in ellipsis licensing. (shrink)

In this paper, we will argue that, of the various grammatical and discourse constraints that affect acceptability in Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), only the structural parallelism constraint is unique to VPE. We outline (previously noted) systematic problems that arise for classical structural accounts of VPE resolution, and discuss efforts in recent research on VPE to reduce explanations of acceptability in VPE to general well-formedness constraints at the level of information structure [e.g. Kehler, 2000, 2002, Kertz, 2013, Kehler, 2015]. In two (...) magnitude estimation experiments, we show that — in line with Kehler’s predictions — degradation due to structural mismatch is modulated by coherence relation. On the other hand, we consistently find residual structural mismatch effects, suggesting that the interpretation of VPE is sensitive to structural features of the VPE antecedent. We propose that a structural constraint licenses VPE, but that sentences violating this constraint can nevertheless be interpreted. The variability in acceptability is accounted for not by additional constraints on VPE in the grammar, but by the numerous general biases that affect sentence and discourse well-formedness, such as information structural constraints [as proposed by Kertz, 2013], discourse coherence relations Kehler [2000], sensitivity to Question Under Discussion structure [e.g. Ginzburg and Sag, 2000, Kehler, 2015], and thematic role bias at the lexical level [e.g. McRae et al., 1998]. We test the prediction that thematic role bias (Experiment 3) and QUD structure (Experiment 4) will influence both elliptical and non-elliptical sentences alike, while structural mismatch continues to degrade elliptical sentences alone. Our proposal differs from existing proposals in cutting the explanatory pie in a different way with respect to how variations in acceptability are accounted for. We suggest that degradation can result from at least two distinct and separable sources: violating construction-specific grammatical constraints, or from complexity differences in interpretation related to very general discourse level information. (shrink)