Negation, VP Ellipsis, and VP Fronting in English : A Construction-HPSG Analysis
نویسنده
چکیده
It is well-known that the English auxiliaries are sensitive to the so called NICE (Negation, Inversion, Contraction, and Ellipsis) phenomena. Based on these empirical properties of auxiliaries, this paper argues for the existence of the construction aux-headph(rase) whose subtypes include negation-ph, inversion-ph, ellipsis-ph, vp-filler-ph, and the like. Each of this subtype has its own construction-specific constraints as well as those inherited from its supertypes. The present analysis uses grammatical constructions with declarative constraints and posits a rich network of inheritance relations among them. This enables us to provide a clean analysis for some of the puzzling phenomena in English such as negation, VP ellipsis, and VP fronting, while capturing new levels of generalizations among these seemlingly unrelated phenomena.
منابع مشابه
A compositional account of VP ellipsis
We present an approach to VP ellipsis that allows the direct derivation of source and target sentences (the former need not be unique) during semantic construction. Specific syntactic constituent structures are associated with ellipsis potential, which can then be discharged by pro-verbs like did (too). The determination of source and target sentence, which is done with semantic features in an ...
متن کاملA Unified Approach to VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora
It is known that VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora are typologically different phenomena. English has VP-ellipses whereas Korean has VP-anaphora. The goals of this paper are (i) to develop a unified algorithm which can analyze these two different phenomena and (ii) to explain them using the developed resolution algorithm. In order to analyze these phenomena, this paper incorporates Jäger (2010)’s ana...
متن کاملNull Object Constructions, VP-Ellipsis, and Sentence Interpretation
This paper discusses issues related to VP-Ellipsis and null object constructions in Mandarin Chinese. It consists of two parts. First, pace Li (1998), I argue that it is not true that no null object construction (NOC) sentences can be analyzed as VP -ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese, and I will show that the fact that the interpretation patterns of the relevant sentences deviate from those of their...
متن کاملNot Voice but Case Identity in VP Ellipsis of English
This paper develops a Case/case-theoretic acco unt for what Merchant (2008) calls voice mism atch in ellipsis constructions of English. Merch ant (ibid.) reports that VP ellipsis as an elision o f smaller size VP allows voice mismatch, but Ps eudogapping and Sluicing as an elision of bigge r size vP/TP do not. However, Tanaka (2011) ar gues against Merchant's dichotomy in voice mis match betwee...
متن کاملAn asymmetry in voice mismatches in VP-ellipsis and pseudogapping
VP-ellipsis and pseudogapping in English show a previously unnoticed asymmetry in their tolerance for voice mismatch: while VP-ellipsis allows mismatches in voice between the elided VP and its antecedent, pseudogapping does not. This difference is unexpected under current analyses of pseudogapping, which posit that pseudogapping is a kind of VP-ellipsis. I show that this difference falls out na...
متن کامل