1,316 research outputs found
Ellipsis, economy, and the (non)uniformity of traces
A number of works have attempted to account for the interaction between movement and ellipsis in terms of an economy condition Max- Elide. We show that the elimination of MaxElide leads to an empirically superior account of these interactions. We show that a number of the core effects attributed to MaxElide can be accounted for with a parallelism condition on ellipsis. The remaining cases are then treated with a generalized economy condition that favors shorter derivations over longer ones. The resulting analysis has no need for the ellipsisspecific economy constraint MaxElide
Syntactic identity, Parallelism and accommodated antecedents
Analyses of the ellipsis identity condition must account for the fact that some syntactic mismatches between an ellipsis site E and its antecedent A are possible while others are not. Previous accounts have suggested that the relevant distinction is between different kinds of heads, such that some heads in the ellipsis site may mismatch while others may not, and they have dealt with this sensitivity to a set of âspecial headsâ with a built-for-purpose syntactic identity condition which holds over and above semantic identity to constrain ellipsis. In this article I argue against this approach and pursue an alternative which holds that identity is syntactic but âlooseâ in a precisely defined way. I show that the relevant generalization that accounts for syntactic identity effects in sluicing and VP-ellipsis-like constructions concerns the position of variables in the antecedent, rather than the feature content of syntactic heads. I propose an implementation of syntactic identity which allows for the accommodation of additional antecedents, with these being derived by a grammatical algorithm for generating alternatives, and I show that this implementation derives the right kinds of looseness while restricting mismatches with respect to the position of variables, thus deriving both the tolerable and intolerable mismatches between E and A without recourse to a specific condition regulating the content of special heads
Sloppy Identity
Although sloppy interpretation is usually accounted for by theories of
ellipsis, it often arises in non-elliptical contexts. In this paper, a theory
of sloppy interpretation is provided which captures this fact. The underlying
idea is that sloppy interpretation results from a semantic constraint on
parallel structures and the theory is shown to predict sloppy readings for
deaccented and paycheck sentences as well as relational-, event-, and
one-anaphora. It is further shown to capture the interaction of sloppy/strict
ambiguity with quantification and binding.Comment: 20 page
Hardt's surprising sloppy readings : a flat binding account
The paper presents an additional argument for a specific account of semantic binding: the flat-binding analysis. The argument is based on observations concerning sloppy interpretations in verb phrase ellipsis when the binder is not the subject of the elided VP. In one such case, it is important that one of the binders belong to the domain of the other. This case can be derived from the flat-binding analysis as is shown in the paper, while it is unclear how to account for it within other analyses of semantic binding
Treating Coordination with Datalog Grammars
In previous work we studied a new type of DCGs, Datalog grammars, which are
inspired on database theory. Their efficiency was shown to be better than that
of their DCG counterparts under (terminating) OLDT-resolution. In this article
we motivate a variant of Datalog grammars which allows us a meta-grammatical
treatment of coordination. This treatment improves in some respects over
previous work on coordination in logic grammars, although more research is
needed for testing it in other respects
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