The Necessity of Comparative Ellipsis—Refuting Lechner’s Claim “Comparative Ellipsis Can Be Dispensed with”

The main aim of this paper is to examine Lechner's (2001) [1] proposal--his CR Hypothesis (Conjunction Reduction (hereafter CR)--that Comparative Ellipsis (hereafter CE) can be dispensed with and reductions of comparative clauses can be entirely explained by operations independently needed for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of language teaching and research 2014-11, Vol.5 (6), p.1417
Main Author: Zhang, Xiao Wen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Clauses
Ellipsis
Grammar, Comparative and general
Hypotheses
Hypothesis
Linguistics
Semantics
Syntax
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Summary:The main aim of this paper is to examine Lechner's (2001) [1] proposal--his CR Hypothesis (Conjunction Reduction (hereafter CR)--that Comparative Ellipsis (hereafter CE) can be dispensed with and reductions of comparative clauses can be entirely explained by operations independently needed for reducing coordinate structures. I argue against this hypothesis and claim that Comparative Ellipsis is necessary. I discuss two special phenomena which can only be analyzed by Comparative Ellipsis, that is, the deletion of the whole complement clause in the than-clause which includes the compared phrase, and the phenomenon of the deletion of the whole than-clause except for a part of the subject. Index Terms--CR-hypothesis, Comparative Ellipsis, stripping
ISSN:1798-4769
2053-0684
DOI:10.4304/jltr.5.6.1417-1423