Deriving Syntactic Structure inside Ellipsis

The proper linguistic representation of ellipsis has been a source of debate for years (Hankamer and Sag, 1976), with ellipsis theories broadly categorizable as being either syntactic or semantic, depending on whether or not an elided constituent is held to contain articulated syntactic structure. In this paper, I combine ideas from both syntactic and semantic theories in order to (1) account for the data that suggest there is syntactic structure within elided constituents, and (2) do so in a manner that preserves one of the prime advantages of existing semantic theories, namely straightforward declarative and procedural intepretations. This is accomplished by stating both semantic and syntactic identity conditions on ellipsis. The syntactic condition is formulated within a desription theory approach to grammar, as in the formalisms proposed in (Vijay-Shanker, 1992), (Rambow et al., 2001) and (Muskens, 2001).