Chapter 7. A Romance perspective on gapping constructions

Abeillé, Anne; Bîlbîie, Gabriela; Mouret, François

doi:10.1075/cal.15.07abe

Cited by 17 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Same observations can be made for examples in (10). However, contrary to what is commonly assumed, gapping does not require strong syntactic parallelism (Sag et al 1985, Abeillé et al 2014, Bîlbîie 2017, as one can observe in (11), where the order of remnants does not parallel that of their correlates. In section 4, Romanian gapping will allow us to observe that the linear order of remnants is not necessarily the same as the linear order of correlates.…”

Section: (5)mentioning

confidence: 61%

Ellipsis and information structure: Evidence from Romanian gapping

Bîlbîie¹

2019

BWPL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the information structure of gapping, a linguistic level which has been much less studied than syntax or semantics. Romanian is a good test case for such a study, since it displays a specific contrastive conjunction iar, which occurs frequently with gapping and which severely restricts the information structure ordering. We explain its high frequency with ellipsis by the fact that it shares several crucial constraints with gapping. Our data show that the contrastive pairs with iar do not have the same contribution: one pair contains contrastive topics, and the other foci. However, the order of the correlates in the source clause does not necessarily match the order of the remnants in the gapped clause. We use a QUD model, based on question-answer congruence, which is very useful for a careful investigation of the discourse and information structure of ellipsis.

show abstract

Section: (5)mentioning

confidence: 61%

Ellipsis and information structure: Evidence from Romanian gapping

Bîlbîie¹

2019

BWPL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The words nunca and sempre obrigatorily trigger proclisis in finite clauses, while topics are only compatible with enclisis 25 On the distinction between English-type Topicalization and Focus-movement in European Portuguese, see Costa/Martins (2011). Abeillée/Bîlbîie/Mouret 2014, Matos 1992Brucart 1999). 26 On the other hand, if the initial constituent of the gapped clause is a topic, the approach to VPE and TPE explored in this paper makes us expect that it is not subject to the disjoint reference condition on contrasted constituents that applies to TPE (see (42) above).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

15 VP and TP ellipsis: Sentential polarity and information structure

Martins¹

2016

Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

VP and TP Ellipsis: sentential polarity and information structureThis paper focuses on two types of predicate ellipsis, namely Verbal Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), also known in the literature as Verb-stranding ellipsis, and Tense Phrase Ellipsis (TPE), also called Stripping or Polarity Ellipsis. It suggests that the polarity-encoding functional category ΣP is involved in the licensing of both types of predicate ellipsis, but only VPE requires that the verb be morphosyntactically associated with the Σ-head. The more restrictive licensing conditions imposed on VPE, relative to TPE, explain its more restricted distribution across languages. At the same time, it permits to account for the correlation between the availability of VPE and a particular type of (typologically rarer) answering system where the bare verb constitutes the unmarked pattern of minimal polar affirmative answer. The paper then concentrates on comparing VP and TP ellipsis in one of the few Romance languages where both types of predicate ellipsis are allowed, viz. European Portuguese, and describes their different articulation with discourse and information structure. The fact that VPE and TPE might not be in free variation in European Portuguese is shown to be a consequence of the different information structure of the elliptical clause in each type of ellipsis. VPE is an instance of single focus (that can be assigned to different constituents) and is subject to a parallelism constraint on contrastive topic structures (Kertz 2013); TPE features double focus bearing on the polarity word and the constituent preceding it.VP ellipsis, TP ellipsis, polarity, answering system, information structure, topic, focus, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan IntroductionThis chapter deals with two types of predicate ellipsis, namely VP Ellipsis (VPE) and TP Ellipsis (TPE, here restricted to what has been known in the literature as stripping or polarity ellipsis). 1 The chapter comprises five sections. In section 2, it is shown that languages that allow VPE and languages that bar it display different patterns of polar answering system. In the languages with VPE the verb by itself may express confirmation or denial, behaving as a polar word in specific pragmatic contexts. Hence, observing the role of VPE in the domain of polar answering systems brings about the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics. A number of empirical arguments ranging through different languages are put forth in section 2 to support the idea that VPE and the grammatical expression of 1 I am grateful to Susann Fischer and two anonymous reviewers for their challenging and very helpful comments on a previous version of this chapter. It goes without saying that all shortcomings are mine. Research for this work was funded by FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within the project WOChWEL (PTDC/CLE-LIN/121707/2010).Martins, Ana Maria (2016). VP and TP Ellipsis: sentential polarity and information structure. In: Susann Fischer and Christoph Gabriel (eds.), Grammatical Interfaces in Romance. Be...

show abstract

“…Constraint based grammars such as Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG, Sag et al 2003) have proposed a fragment-based analysis (without movement nor deletion) for other kinds of ellipsis such as sluicing (Ginzburg & Sag 2000) and gapping (Abeillé et al 2014; see Ginzburg & Miller 2019 for an overall perspective on ellipsis in HPSG), thus favoring a direct interpretation approach (see also Culicover & Jackendoff 2005;Culicover & Jackendoff 2012). However, for RNR, such an approach is difficult due to the high variability of the elliptical material, which does not necessarily correspond to a syntactic constituent (see (30-a), (31-b) and (31-c)).…”

Section: An Hpsg Analysis Of Rnrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verbal mismatch in Right-Node Raising

Shiraïshi

Abeillé

Miller

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Right-Node Raising (RNR, Ross 1967; Chaves 2014) has been claimed to require phonological identity between the missing material and the shared element. Our corpus investigations provide examples of RNR with verb form mismatch with and without syncretism in English and French. Two acceptability experiments show that lack of phonological identity does not affect the acceptability of RNR. We argue further that RNR without phonological identity cannot be taken to be a case of cataphoric VP-ellipsis in French and that it should not be analyzed as such in English. As regards the status of RNR with verb form mismatch, two positions are available: either it is considered to be grammatical, in which case the phonological resolution principle of Pullum & Zwicky (1986) does not hold, or it is considered to be ungrammatical but repaired (or " recycled", Arregui et al. 2006; Frazier 2013). The high acceptability of cases with mismatch compared with ungrammatical controls casts doubt on the applicability of the recycling hypothesis in such cases. In order to account for the broader range of data established by our corpus and experimental results, we propose a new analysis of RNR based on lexeme identity rather than form identity.

show abstract

Chapter 7. A Romance perspective on gapping constructions

Cited by 17 publications

References 23 publications

Ellipsis and information structure: Evidence from Romanian gapping

Ellipsis and information structure: Evidence from Romanian gapping

15 VP and TP ellipsis: Sentential polarity and information structure

Verbal mismatch in Right-Node Raising

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About