Abstract This paper argues that verb phrase ellipsis requires contrast. The central observation is ungrammatical in tautologous conditionals; e.g., * If John wins, then he does . Ellipsis correctly ruled out by a focus-based theory of (Rooth 1992a,b), but one crucially imports focus’s requirement for contrast: an elliptical constituent must have antecedent not merely alternative to it, ‘proper’...

Subject ellipsis is not typically considered to be a common occurrence in English, although it has been studied within certain genres of text, including personal diaries. The current paper explores English subject ellipsis in a diary corpus that has been constructed from online weblogs (blogs). The pronouns I and it were found to be the most frequently omitted subjects and their identities were...

The paper investigates an elliptical construction, Clarification Ellipsis, that occurs in dialogue. We suggest that this provides data that demonstrates that updates resulting from utterances cannot be defined in purely semantic terms, contrary to the prevailing assumptions of existing approaches to dynamic semantics. We offer a computationally oriented analysis of the resolution of ellipsis in...

This paper addresses a phenomenon in which certain word-parts can be omitted. The evidence shows that the full range of data cannot be captured by a sublexical analysis, since the phenomena can be observed both in phrasal and in lexical environments. It is argued that a form of deletion is involved, and that the phenomena – lexical or otherwise – are subject to the same phonological, semantic, ...

Many current sentence generators lack the ability to compute elliptical versions of coordinated clauses in accordance with the rules for Gapping, Forward and Backward Conjunction Reduction, and SGF (Subject Gap in clauses with Finite/Fronted verb). We describe a module (implemented in JAVA, with German and Dutch as target languages) that takes non-elliptical coordinated clauses as input and ret...

In this paper, a semantic parser with support to ellipsis resolution in a Chinese spoken language dialogue system is proposed. The grammar and parsing strategy of this parser is designed to address the characteristics of spoken language and to support the ellipsis resolution. Namely, it parses the user utterance with a domain-specific semantic grammar based on a template-filling approach. Synta...

Levin and Prince (1982) note that gapped sentences do not give rise to causal implicatures often associated with their nongapped counterparts. For instance, while (a) can have both a symmetric and asymmetric (causal) reading, the gapped version in (b) can only have the symmetric reading. (a) Sue became upset and Nan became downright angry. (b) Sue became upset and Nan ; downright angry. We show...

A highly pervasive phenomenon in natural languages is ellipsis. It is commonly believed that the presence of ellipsis is one of the main reasons why natural language is as ambiguous as it is. If lexical material is left unpronounced, a hearer must rely on other parts of the sentence, on contextual information and on intonation to recover the unpronounced material. Because there may be different...