Download or read book The Syntax of Silence written by Jason Merchant and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A primary goal of contemporary theoretical linguistics is to develop a theory of the correspondence between sound (or gesture) and meaning. This sound-meaning correspondence breaks down completely in the case of ellipsis, and yet various forms of ellipsis are pervasive in natural language:words and phrases which should be in the linguistic signal go missing. How this should be possible is the focus of Jason Merchant's investigation. He focuses on the form of ellipsis known as sluicing, a common feature of interrogative clauses, such as in 'Sally's out hunting - guess what!'; and'Someone called, but I can't tell you who'. It is the most frequently found cross-linguistic form of ellipsis. Dr Merchant studies the phenomenon across twenty-four languages, and attempts to explain it in linguistic and behavioural terms.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis written by Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 1147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis, a phenomena whereby expressions in natural language appear to be incomplete but are still understood. It explores fundamental questions about the workings of grammar and provides detailed case studies of inter- and intralinguistic variation.
Download or read book A Theory of Ellipsis written by Marjorie J. McShane and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellipsis is the non-expression of one or more sentence elements whose meaning can be reconstructed either from the context or from a person's knowledge of the world. In speech and writing, ellipsis is pervasive, contributing in various ways to the economy, speed, and style of communication. Resolving ellipsis is a particularly challenging issue in natural language processing, since not only must meaning be gleaned from missing elements but the fact that something meaningful is missing must be detected in the first place. Marjorie McShane presents a comprehensive theory of ellipsis that supports the formal, cross-linguistic description of elliptical phenomena taking into account the various factors that affect the use of ellipsis. A methodology is suggested for creating a parameter space describing and treating ellipsis in any language. Such "ellipsis profiles" of languages will serve a wide range of practical applications, including but not limited to natural language processing. In contrast to earlier work, this theory focuses not only on what can, in principle, be elided but in what circumstances a given category actually would or would not be elided--that is, what renders ellipsis mandatory or infelicitous. A theory of ellipsis has been elusive because to produce an adequate account of this ubiquitous phenomenon one needs to address and integrate data from a wide variety of linguistic research areas. Using data primarily from Russian, English, and Polish, McShane looks at the big picture of ellipsis, integrating the syntactic, semantic, morphological, and pragmatic heuristics and bridges work on ellipsis with the larger study of reference. This is groundbreaking linguistic scholarship that bridges the theoretical and the applied, and will interest scholars in the fields of computational, descriptive, and theoretical linguistics.
Download or read book A Theory of Ellipsis written by Marjorie Joan McShane and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive theory of ellipsis that supports the formal, cross-linguistic description of elliptical phenomena. In contrast to earlier work, this study focuses on the interconnected factors that determine whether ellipsis should or should not be used in a given context.
Download or read book Words and Thoughts written by Robert Stainton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a near truism of philosophy of language that sentences are prior to words---that they are the only things that fundamentally have meaning. Robert's Stainton's study interrogates this idea, drawing on a wide body of evidence to argue that speakers can and do use mere words, not sentences, to communicate complex thoughts.
Download or read book The Syntactic Licensing of Ellipsis written by Lobke Aelbrecht and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph presents a theory of ellipsis licensing in terms of Agree and applies it to several elliptical phenomena in both English and Dutch. The author makes two main claims: The head selecting the ellipsis site is checked against the head licensing ellipsis in order for ellipsis to occur, and ellipsis i.e., sending part of the structure to PF for non-pronunciation occurs as soon as this checking relation is established. At that point, the ellipsis site becomes inaccessible for further syntactic operations. Consequently, this theory explains the limited extraction data displayed by Dutch modals complement ellipsis as well as British English "do" These ellipses allow subject extraction out of the ellipsis site, but not object extraction. The analysis also extends to phenomena that do not display such a restricted extraction, such as sluicing, VP ellipsis, and pseudogapping. Hence, this work is a step towards a unified analysis of ellipsis."
Download or read book A Theory of Ellipsis written by Marjorie J. McShane and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2005-03-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive theory of ellipsis that supports the formal, cross-lingusitic description of elliptical phenomena.
Download or read book Parenthesis and Ellipsis written by Marlies Kluck and published by ISSN. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a cross-section of research addressing the interaction of two prominent areas in linguistic theory: parenthesis and ellipsis. The contributions address various theoretical questions raised by 'incomplete' parenthetical constituents, covering a diverse empirical domain and various subfields of linguistics.
Download or read book Principle B VP Ellipsis and Interpretation in Child Grammar written by Rosalind Thornton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring expressions. The principle that is relevant for pronouns, Principle B, has provided a fertile ground for the study of linguistic development. Although it has long been known that children make certain kinds of errors that appear to contradict this principle, further experimental and theoretical investigation reveals that the child does know the grammatical principle, but implements the pragmatic knowledge incorrectly. In fact, discoveries concerning children's knowledge of Principle B are among the most well-known in the study of language acquisition because of the dissociation between syntactic and pragmatic knowledge (binding versus reference). In this book the authors deepen and extend the results of years of developmental investigation of Principle B by studying the interaction of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis--properties of "strict" and "sloppy" interpretation. This is the first experimental study of these topics in the developmental literature. The striking results show that detailed predictions from the "pragmatic deficiency" theory seem to be correct. Many novel experimental results concern the question of how children interpret pronouns, including elided pronouns, and how they understand VP ellipsis. The authors present the necessary theoretical background on Principle B, review and critique previous accounts of childrens errors, and present a novel account of why children misinterpret pronouns. The book will thus be of interest not only to readers interested in the development of the binding theory, but to those interested in the development of interpretation and reference by children.
Download or read book Context Dependence Perspective and Relativity written by Francois Recanati and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions.
Download or read book Topics in Ellipsis written by Bernhard Schwarz and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments written by Robin Lemke and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the syntax and usage of fragments (Morgan 1973), apparently subsentential utterances like "A coffee, please!" which fulfill the same communicative function as the corresponding full sentence "I'd like to have a coffee, please!". Even though such utterances are frequently used, they challenge the central role that has been attributed to the notion of sentence in linguistic theory, particularly from a semantic perspective. The first part of the book is dedicated to the syntactic analysis of fragments, which is investigated with experimental methods. Currently there are several competing theoretical analyses of fragments, which rely almost only on introspective data. The experiments presented in this book constitute a first systematic evaluation of some of their crucial predictions and, taken together, support an in situ ellipsis account of fragments, as has been suggested by Reich (2007). The second part of the book addresses the questions of why fragments are used at all, and under which circumstances they are preferred over complete sentences. Syntactic accounts impose licensing conditions on fragments, but they do not explain, why fragments are sometimes (dis)preferred provided that their usage is licensed. This book proposes an information-theoretic account of fragments, which predicts that the usage of fragments in constrained by a general tendency to distribute processing effort uniformly across the utterance. With respect to fragments, this leads to two predictions, which are empirically confirmed: Speakers tend towards omitting predictable words and they insert additional redundancy before unpredictable words.
Download or read book The Syntax of Ellipsis written by Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2010-02-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Syntax of Ellipsis provides an in-depth analysis of a number of previously undiscussed elliptical constructions in Dutch dialects, and explores their consequences for the theory of ellipsis. Van Craenenbroeck argues that both the PF-deletion and the pro-theory of ellipsis are needed to account for the full range of elliptical phenomena attested in natural language.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax written by Marcel den Dikken and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.
Download or read book Ellipsis in English Literature written by Anne Toner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of ellipsis marks and their functions in major works of English literature over the past 500 years.
Download or read book Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech written by Reinaldo Elugardo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-05-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume address two main topics: Q1: What is the nature, and especially the scope, of ellipsis in natural language? Q2: What are the linguistic/philosophical implications of what one takes the nature/scope of ellipsis to be? Each of these main topics includes a large sub-part that deals specifically with nonsentential speech. Within the first main topic, Q1, there arises the sub-issue of whether nonsentential speech falls within the scope of ellipsis or not; within the second main topic, Q2, there arises the sub-issue of what linguistic/philosophical implications follow, if nonsentential speech does/does not count as ellipsis. This book is unique in that it offers the reader; Papers on the boundary between philosophy and linguistics, Applications of advanced work in theoretical linguistics to traditional philosophical questions, It is the only volume of papers ever published on sub-sentential speech, Major contribution to our understanding of ellipsis in natural language, presently a central topic in syntactic theory. This book is of interest to professionals and advanced graduate students in the fields of philosophy of language, semantics, and syntax.
Download or read book Parenthesis and Ellipsis written by Marlies Kluck and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-12-12 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a cross-section of research addressing the interaction of two prominent areas in linguistic theory: parenthesis and ellipsis. The contributions address various theoretical questions raised by 'incomplete' parenthetical constituents, covering a diverse empirical domain and various subfields of linguistics.
