Open AccessEliding the derivation: A minimalist formalization of ellipsis
Author(s) -
Gregory M. Kobele
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2012.23
Subject(s) - computer science , ellipsis (linguistics) , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , natural language processing , verb phrase ellipsis , parsing , linguistics , artificial intelligence , sentence , context (archaeology) , verb , psychology , paleontology , developmental psychology , philosophy , biology , modal verb
In this paper I use the formal framework of minimalist grammars to implement a version of thetraditional approach to ellipsis as ‘deletion under syntactic (derivational) identity’, which, inconjunction with canonical analyses of voice phenomena, immediately allows for voice mismatches inverb phrase ellipsis, but not in sluicing. This approach to ellipsis is naturally implemented in aparser by means of threading a state encoding a set of possible antecedent derivation contextsthrough the derivation tree. Similarities between ellipsis and pronominal resolution are easilystated in these terms. In the context of this implementation, two approaches to ellipsis in thetransformational community are naturally seen as equivalent descriptions at different levels: theLF-copying approach to ellipsis resolution is best seen as a description of the parser, whereas thephonological deletion approach a description of the underlying relation between form and meaning.