tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "SOME PROBLEMATIC CASES OF VP ELLIPSIS"

It has been widely assumed that VP ellipsis is governed by an identity condition: the elided VP is interpreted as an identical copy of another expression in surrounding discourse. For example, Sag (76) imposes an identity condition on Logical Form representations of VP's. A basic feature of this account is the requirement that a syntactic VP be available as the antecedent. This requirement is reflected in most subsequent accounts as well. In this paper I examine three cases of VP ellipsis in which the antecedent cannot be identified with any VP. . | SOME PROBLEMATIC CASES OF VP ELLIPSIS Daniel Hardt Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA 19104 Internet hardt@ INTRODUCTION It has been widely assumed that VP ellipsis is governed by an identity condition the elided VP is interpreted as an identical copy of another expression in surrounding discourse. For example Sag 76 imposes an identity condition on Logical Form representations of VP s. A basic feature of this account is the requirement that a syntactic VP be available as the antecedent. This requirement is reflected in most subsequent accounts as well. In this paper I examine three cases of VP ellipsis in which the antecedent cannot be identified with any VP. These cases which are illustrated using naturally-occurring examples present a fundamental problem for any of the standard approaches. I will argue that they receive a natural treatment in the system I have developed in which VP ellipsis is treated by storing VP meanings in a discourse model. I will address the following three problems Combined Antecedents The antecedent may be a combination of more than one previous property. Passive Antecedents the antecedent in a passive clause may not be associated with any VP but rather the property associated with the active counterpart of that clause. NP Antecedents the antecedent may be a property associated with an NP. In what follows I sketch my general approach to VP ellipsis after which I show how each of the above phenomena can be treated in this approach. BACKGROUND VP ellipsis I suggest is to be explained along the lines of familiar accounts of pronominal anaphora . Kamp 80 Heim 81 . A discourse model is posited containing various semantic objects including among other things entities and properties that have been evoked in preceding discourse. Typically entities are evoked by NP s and properties by VP s. The interpretation of a pronoun involves a selection among the entities stored in