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ON ELLIPSIS (SYNTAX)
Abstract
This work is intended as an investigation into elliptical phenomena in natural language. It is argued that at least two major classes of elliptical constructions must be distinguished, on the basis of the presence or absence of their major phrasal heads. The recovery of the missing material in the class in which the relevant heads are missing (H('(TURN)) class) is of a syntactic nature, and this along with other 'characteristic properties' of H('(TURN)) constructions follow as a direct consequence of the omission of their syntactic heads. In constrast, constructions in the H+ class are pronominal in nature, and their characteristic properties follow from the fact that pronominals may be interpreted either in the syntax (e.g., as bound variables) or in the discourse representation. An account of these constructions is proposed within the Government-Binding framework, and consists of four main components: (i) a 'defective' X-bar schema, which allows for the base-generation of H('(TURN)) constructions, (ii) a licensing principle on D-structure representations, which constrains the output of the defective rule schema, and (iii) a process of elliptical reconstruction at LF, which applies to both H('(TURN)) and H+ constructions, and (iv) the reintroduction of the more general notion of 'recovery of content' to subsume the more narrowly defined notion of 'syntactic identification.' It is argued that this proposal has several desirable consequences. In the first place, it provides a strictly syntactic basis for the H+/H('(TURN)) classification, and derives the distributional and interpretive properties of these constructions from the interaction of this syntactic fact with existing principles in the theory. It accounts for interesting similarities between null arguments (pro) and H+ phenomena. It sheds light on various aspects of the interpretation of both elliptical and overt pronominal elements. And finally, it makes predictions about the range of variation in the manifestations of H('(TURN)) and H+ constructions that one may expect to find in natural language. The linguistic data in this work is drawn primarily from English, but constructions from French, Brazilian Portuguese and Chinese are considered as well.
Subject Area
Linguistics
Recommended Citation
CHAO, WYNN, "ON ELLIPSIS (SYNTAX)" (1987). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8710433.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8710433