Ellipsis, Subsentential Speech, and the Contextualism Discussion

The nature of ellipsis resolution has long been the topic of a heated discussion in the linguistics literature. Ellipsis is a widespread linguistic phenomenon. I show here that an adequate account of ellipsis will have to make use of context in the sense of previous discourse. “Syntactic” accounts of ellipsis are no way out of this. This will be an argument for contextualists who claim that “what is said” depends largely on surrounding context. It also sheds light on the status of subsentential speech, in particular it shows that subsuming it under ellipsis can’t save a semantic minimalist account of subsentential utterances.