Topics in Ellipsis

Ellipsis occurs when certain portions of a sentence are not spoken - for example "Mary has read more books than Bill has [read books]" and "Jack called, but I don’t know where [he called] from". These constructions interest linguists because the meaning of the sentence cannot be traced directly to the words it contains. This volume brings together a team of leading syntacticians to propose new and original solutions to some key questions in the study of ellipsis: What characterizes ellipsis? Under what conditions is it possible? What kinds of meanings are allowed to go unspoken? Drawing on a variety of authentic constructions, they examine ellipsis in the context of a range of syntactic phenomena such as binding, raising, anaphora, movement and scrambling. Making significant progress towards solving some central problems in syntactic theory, this cutting-edge volume will be of key interest to anyone working on theoretical syntax, semantics and psycholinguistics.

• Proposes answers to some questions/issues that have posed problems to linguists for over thirty years • Contains fresh, original and cutting-edge work by the world’s leading specialists on the topic • Reveals some important new data and sketches out new generalizations and theories

1 Introduction Kyle Johnson; 2. VP Ellipsis and constraints on interpretation Daniel Hardt; 3. Direct compositionality and variable-free semantics: the case of antecedent contained deletion Pauline Jacobson; 4. The view of QR from ellipsis Kyle Johnson; 5. Argument contained ellipsis Chris Kennedy; 6. Variable island repair under ellipsis Jason Merchant; 7. On binding scope and ellipsis scope Winfried Lechner; 8. The silent content of bound variable pronouns Uli Sauerland; 9. A step-by-step guide to ellipsis resolution Satoshi Tomioka; 10. Shared constituents and linearization Chris Wilder.