Imperfect Ellipsis: Antecedents beyond Syntax?

Abstract

Ellipsis is subject to both syntactic conditions and discourse conditions. Here we explore the discourse condition that favors antecedents that are part of the main assertion of an utterance. We argue that the main assertion tendency is best captured in the processor, not the grammar. Two experiments test verb phrase ellipsis examples with antecedents in a conditional. One suggests that, because of the main assertion tendency, a reader considers full conditional antecedents and not just verb phrase antecedents. However, when the antecedent of the conditional expresses already given information and essentially becomes redundant, fewer full conditional antecedents are chosen for the verb phrase ellipsis, as if the consequent clause has become the assertion of the conditional sentence with the if-clause essentially cancelling out. The second experiment explores examples where a modal is added inside the if-clause, rendering the conditional counterfactual. As in other examples of flawed or imperfect ellipsis, the non-actuality entailment/implicature improves the acceptability of such examples.

Essays Written by Primary School Students at Grade Six in Tabanan Regency, Bali Province: A Syntactic Approach

“…For the word strand to contain the complete meaning, it should have S and P elements. This is in accordance with the opinion [1,2,18] which states that sentences are strands that contain complete meanings. The characteristic of the complete meaning consists with elements S and P.…”

Did It Happen? The Pragmatic Complexity of Veridicality Assessment

“…4 This finding is consistent with the evidential analysis of such parentheticals, but it suggests that standard embedding can function pragmatically as an evidential as well. This result is expected under the analysis of Simons (2007) (see also Frazier and Clifton 2005;Clifton and Frazier 2010). It is also anticipated by Karttunen (1973), who focuses on the question of whether attitude verbs are plugs for presuppositions, that is, whether presuppositions introduced in their complements are interpreted as semantically embedded.…”

“…To approximate such world knowledge, we also obtained subject-verb bigram and subject counts from the New York Times portion of GigaWord and then included log(subjectverb-counts/subject-counts) as a feature. The intuition here is that some embedded clauses carry the main point of the sentence (Frazier and Clifton 2005;Simons 2007;Clifton and Frazier 2010), with the overall frequency of the elements introducing the embedded clause contributing to readers' veridicality assessments.…”

“…Computational Linguistics Just Accepted MS. doi: 10.1162/COLI_a_00097 clauses carry the main point of the sentence (Frazier and Clifton 2005;Clifton and Frazier 2010;Simons 2007), with the overall frequency of the elements introducing the embedded clause contributing to readers' veridicality assessments.…”

The role of Non-Actuality Implicatures in processing elided constituents

“…Clifton and Frazier’s (2010) Experiment 2 results provide some support for this claim, showing that a nonactuality-entailment inducing modal in the antecedent of an ellipsis improved acceptability while one in the ellipsis itself did not. Intuitions about the effects of a negation may also support it.…”