Discourse Parallelism, Scope, and Ellipsis

Abstract

It has frequently been observed that structural ambiguity does not multiply in contexts involving ellipsis: ! that is, if there is an ambiguity associated with the antecedent of an ellipsis occurrence, that ambiguity must be resolved in the same way in both the antecedent and at the ellipsis site. The following example (Dalrymple et aI., 1991) illustrates this with a case of quantifier scope ambiguity:

Semantic interpretation of unrealized syntactic material in LTAG

“…Many previous approaches impose parallelism constraints on the interpretation of the elided material (e.g. Fox 2000, Asher et al 2001. Under the present analysis, scope parallelism comes for free.…”

“…each building has both an American and a Canadian flag standing in front of it. The existence of such readings does not present a problem for the present analysis, if we adopt an analysis of quantificational NPs proposed in Babko-Malaya 2004. l 3 : λv 3 C 3 (r) Jane(r) l 4 : Bill(r) l 3 : λv 3 .C 3 (r) l 0 : give(v, u, w) l 1 : λv.C 1 (x) l 2 : λu.C 2 (y) l 2 ≤ C 1 l 3 : λw.C 3 (z) l 3 ≤ C 2 l 7 : every(y, R 7 , N 7 ) l 5 : some(z, R 5 , N 5 ) l 8 : student(y) l 9 : test(z) john(x) l 0 ≤ C 3 l 0 ≤ N 5 l 0 ≤ N 7 l 8 ≤ R 7 l 9 ≤ R 5 Further evidence for the proposed analysis comes from sentences with ACD, discussed in Sag 1980, Egg and Erk 2001, Asher et al 2001, and illustrated in (13): (13) John wants Mary to read every book Bill does.…”

Identity in ellipsis: An introduction

“…Semantic accounts of ellipsis identity state the identity relation over semantic representations of the antecedent and ellipsis site (see among others Dalrymple et al, 1991;Hardt, 1993Hardt, , 1999Asher et al, 1997;Kempson et al, 1999;Ginzburg and Sag, 2000;Prüst, 1993;Merchant, 2001;Hendriks, 2004;Hendriks and Spenader, 2005;Barker, 2013).…”

Quelles relations de discours pour les structures énumératives ?

“…On peut citer par exemple le problème de l'anaphore pronominale interphrastique, étudié dans un cadre discursif formel dès (Hobbs, 1979), les relations temporelles interphrastiques (Lascarides et Asher, 1993) et les questions de parallélisme autorisant certaines formes d'ellipses (Asher et. al, 2001), (Kehler, 2002).…”