A Theory Of Ellipsis

A Theory of Ellipsis MARJORIE J. McSHANE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS A Theory of Ellipsis This page intentionally left blank A Theory of Ellipsis  .  1 2005 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McShane, Marjorie Joan, 1967– A theory of ellipsis / Marjorie J. McShane. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-517692-6 ISBN 0-19-517692-8 1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Ellipsis. I. Title. P291.3.M38 2005 415—dc22 2004043497 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Ruth McShane This page intentionally left blank PREFACE This book proceeds from the assumption that progress in describing and processing ellipsis in any of the world’s languages is best achieved using an extensible parameters-and-values approach. Such a parameter-oriented description should incorporate factors from many branches of linguistics and, when fully developed, should be explicit enough to permit a computer to interpret and generate elliptical utterances. Thus, in contrast to available descriptions of ellipsis, the question is not only what can be elided in a language but also in what circumstances a given category would be elided, including the factors that might render ellipsis mandatory or unacceptable and the effect of eliding one category on the ellipsis potential of others. Since seeing the big picture can facilitate work on any corner of it, this framework encompasses unexpressed elements at the syntactic, semantic, and morphological levels and bridges work on ellipsis with the larger study of reference. In principle, all descriptive material on any language, presented within any branch of linguistics, could contribute to the development of this theory. But for this book exhaustive depth and breadth of coverage was not the main goal—though the coverage of phenomena in the chapters that follow is quite representative. Instead, the book concentrates on: • developing a methodology for describing ellipsis, • supporting that methodology and the description it licenses in terms of potential applications, • creating an inventory of relevant phenomena (which, for this work, derives primarily from a study of English, Russian, and Polish but incorporates select phenomena from other languages), viii PREFACE • formulating sample algorithms and heuristics for the analysis and synthesis of elliptical expressions, and • presenting samples of the type of close description that would