Quirky ellipsis

15 November 2011, Academiegebouw (A900)

University of Groningen

Workshop description

This workshop brings together a group of scholars interested in unfamiliar kinds of ellipsis an/or ellipsis in less well-known configurations. The starting point is the idea that so-called "sentence amalgams" should be viewed as an instance of sluicing in parentheticals (Kluck 2011). Interesting implications of this approach are for instance that antecedents of sluicing may be scattered around the ellipsis site, that ellipsis can be (partially) backward, and that sluicing correlates can be empty. The topics are obviously not limited to amalgamation, but include poorly understood NP-ellipsis in Greek, unexpected interactions between ellipsis and negation, and peculiar parentheticals in Spanish.

The workshop is organized on the occasion of Marlies Kluck's thesis defense (14 november, 14:30 in the Aula of the Academiegebouw).

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (HU Brussel, Belgium)
Kyle Johnson (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MA)
Marlies Kluck (University of Groningen)
Jason Merchant (University of Chicago, IL)
Luis Vicente (University of Potsdam)
Jan-Wouter Zwart (University of Groningen)

Programme

9:30
opening

9:40 - 10:10 -- Marlies Kluck "Multiple puzzles for the sluicing approach to amalgams" --
I'll discuss the puzzles of multiple amalgamation , and the puzzle of multiple sluicing and amalgamation in relation to the sluicing approach proposed in Kluck 2011 and the alternative multidominance analysis suggested in Guimarães 2004 and in Van Riemsdijk's work (1998, 2006a/b).

10:10 - 10:40
coffee break - De Bruinszaal (Academiegebouw)

10:40 - 11:20 -- Jeroen van Craenenbroeck "Quirky interactions between ellipsis and negation" (joint work with Tanja Temmerman) --
This talk examines the behavior of negative indefinites in verbal ellipsis sites. We show (a) that "not...any" cannot antecede the ellipsis of "no", and (b) that negative indefinites cannot take scope out of verbal ellipsis sites. The key ingredient of our analysis is the claim that negative indefinites involve fusion under adjacency between the polarity head and a determiner, and that this adjancency comes about under multidominance. Given that ellipsis is a PF-process it can block fusion, thus preventing high scope of negative indefinites as well as certain polarity switches.

11:20 - 12:00 -- Kyle Johnson "On Deriving Vehicle Change" --
I'll flesh out an approach to Principle C in which the disjoint reference effect triggered by definite description arises because there is a preference for using bound pronouns in those cases. Philippe Schlenker has linked this approach to the idea that the NP part of a definite description should be the most minimal in content relative to a certain communicative goal. On a popular view about what the syntax and semantics of a personal pronoun is, that should have the effect of favoring a pronoun over a definite description. This paper shows how that can be made the source of ``Vehicle Change,'' an effect in ellipsis contexts in which definite descriptions seem to behave like pronouns. It requires, however, a way of distinguishing bound pronouns from non-bound pronouns, and the paper makes a proposal about how these two kinds of pronouns can be distinguished in the way needed.

12:00 - 12:50
lunch break (canteen of the Academiegebouw)

12:50 - 13:30 -- Luis Vicente "Collins conjunctions and the grammar of parentheticals" --
Collins (1988) observed that modal evidential/evaluative adverbs ("possibly", "maybe", "apparently"...) can modify individual conjuncts of what appears to be a DP-level coordinate structure. These are what I call "Collins conjunctions", i.e. The Columbia students and possibly the Harvard students will form an unbroken chain around the Pentagon. In this talk, I'm going to be looking at the Spanish version of Collins conjunctions, which have the peculiarity that not only adverbs can appear inside a DP conjunction: full clauses that embed the second conjunct can also appear there. Furthermore, if both DP conjuncts are singular, verb agreement can be optionally either plural or singular (with some degree of idiolectal variation). To make matters even stranger, the [DP and DP] string can appear anywhere a regular DP can (e.g., in the case of subjects, in postverbal position), while still preserving the agreement uncertainty. What I will propose is that some cases can be subsumed under a multidomination analysis of Right Node Raising. The analysis will require a detailed look at the properties of multidomination structures, especially their linearization requirements (following work by Gracanin-Yuksek and Grosz).

13:30 - 14:10 -- Jan-Wouter Zwart "Return to Vehicle Change" --

14:10 - 14:50 -- Jason Merchant "Quirky isotopes of gender in Greek NPE" --
Masculine/feminine pairs of human-denoting nouns in Greek fall into three distinct classes under predicative ellipsis: those that license ellipsis of their counterpart regardless of gender, those that only license ellipsis of a same-gendered noun, and those in which the masculine noun of the pair licenses ellipsis of the feminine version, but not vice versa. The three classes are uniform in disallowing any gender mismatched ellipses in argument uses, however. This differential behavior of gender in nominal ellipsis can be captured by positing that each value of gender has two isotopes, encoded using a novel feature 'delible' and a feature-changing Agree operation before LF-copy; other approaches to ellipsis are forced to posit ambiguity.

14:55
Closing, drinks afterwards

Venue

Academiegebouw, room A900
Broerstraat 5
9712 CP Groningen