Ellipsis and Higher-Order Unification

We present a new method for characterizing the interpretive possibilities generated by elliptical constructions in natural language. Unlike previous analyses, which postulate ambiguity of interpretation or derivation in the full clause source of the ellipsis, our analysis requires no such hidden amb...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistics and philosophy 1991-08, Vol.14 (4), p.399-452
Main Authors: Dalrymple, Mary, Shieber, Stuart M., Pereira, Fernando C. N.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ambiguity
Anaphora
Ellipsis
Golf
Grammatical clauses
Grammatical constructions
Pronouns
Relative clauses
Syntactical antecedents
Syntactics
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Summary:We present a new method for characterizing the interpretive possibilities generated by elliptical constructions in natural language. Unlike previous analyses, which postulate ambiguity of interpretation or derivation in the full clause source of the ellipsis, our analysis requires no such hidden ambiguity. Further, the analysis follows relatively directly from an abstract statement of the ellipsis interpretation problem. It predicts correctly a wide range of interactions between ellipsis and other semantic phenomena such as quantifier scope and bound anaphora. Finally, although the analysis itself is stated nonprocedurally, it admits of a direct computational method for generating interpretations.
ISSN:0165-0157
1573-0549
DOI:10.1007/BF00630923