Short answers in Scottish Gaelic and their theoretical implications

This article presents an analysis of a novel short answer strategy in Scottish Gaelic, called the Verb-Answer, which differs from standard fragment answers in allowing us to directly observe some of the clausal structure in which it is embedded. It is shown that the Verb-Answer is identical to the fragment answer in virtually all other respects, demanding a unified analysis, and it is demonstrated that pursuing a unified analysis is problematic for Direct Interpretation approaches to short answers, but straightforward for the Silent Structure approach of Morgan (1973) and Merchant (2004). The extended typology of short answer strategies therefore provides an argument in favour of the latter approach to elliptical phenomena

DPs in adjectival small clauses in Romanian: a diachronic perspective

This paper focuses on some diachronic data from Romanian concerning adjectival predicates under intensional verbs (consider-Adj. types). The interest in these constructions resides not only in their contribution to the investigation of one of the most versatile structures in human language, namely small clauses, but also in their relevance for understanding the Romanian DPs and DOM strategies, due to the salient diachronic stability of important structural properties of these configurations. It is proposed that a complex predicate analysis employing a Multiple Agreement Mechanism is able to derive the strong/specific readings of the shared arguments under discussion; the variation in the DOM marking of pronouns is correlated to a plausibly more recent development of the definiteness scale for differential marking in Romanian, complementary to the animacy scale

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other