MaxElide and clause structure in Scottish Gaelic

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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 “special heads” 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 “loose” 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

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

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

Syntax in experimental literature: a literary linguistic investigation

This dissertation uses the methods of literary linguistics to investigate experimental uses of literary language. I consider what kinds of formal experimentation are possible with natural language, examine how the unusual forms of experimental literature are interpreted, and ask what these kinds of experimentation show us about the nature of language. To begin with, I will discuss the goals of this study in detail, outlining the theoretical basis for a linguistic study of experimental literature and what may be learned from such a study. Literary linguistics is concerned with understanding how literary texts use language, focusing on formal aspects of literary texts and how they are related to the formal features of language. Language is the medium of literary texts, and the formal aspects of these texts - such as metre or genre - are in part enabled by using this medium. To understand regularities in the formal aspects of literary texts, literary linguistics research explores regularities in linguistic form and the ways in which the literary form exploits linguistic form

‘Verb floating’ and VP-ellipsis:Towards a movement account of ellipsis licensing

In this paper I propose that ellipsis is licensed by overt movement. Examining variation in VP-ellipsis across English dialects, I show that movement is crucially implicated in whether or not a given element can license ellipsis. I discuss well-known restrictions on VP-ellipsis and present new data that shows that a movement-based account of these restrictions is superior to previous ones. I show that the proposed account can be extended to other cases involving A′ movement with empirical benefits, and I conclude by sketching the technical implementation of the theory, arguing that ellipsis is a ‘repair’ operation that prevents a linearization failure following non-deletion of a lower copy. I suggest that types of movement that are unable to spell out lower copies (i.e. A-movement) do not license ellipsis, thus explaining ellipsis licensing in terms of general conditions on copy deletion