obvious semantics to assign is something like Nominative=Agent and Ac-
cusative=Theme, but this fails in passives, in which the semantics is the same
but the case assignment reversed (She saw him = He was seen by her). So the
claim that ‘this alternative story about case can explain the facts’ (p. 109) is
wrong.
15
If anything deserves the name ‘shorthand,’ it is probably such examples.
But they are shorthand for particular syntactic configurations (‘constructions’
if you will), with language-specific properties that must be learned individu-
ally. They are not the result of general purpose mechanisms, which would in
fact produce the wrong result here (namely nominative) and must be blocked
by an elsewhere principle.
6.
Ellipsis
pragmatic
The third and last kind of ‘ellipsis’ that Stainton discusses in describing the
lay of the land is ‘pragmatic ellipsis’. He is appropriately hesitant to use this
phrase (p. 38), and its use is mostly for rhetorical balance: we have syntactic,
semantic, and therefore also pragmatic ‘ellipses’. But Stainton makes quite
clear that there is no sense of the word ‘ellipsis’ which applies in the prag-
matics, so to speak: it only describes his own proposal by process of elimina-
tion, and doesn’t add any clarity. Just the opposite, in fact: the term denotes
nothing at all, and I also have no use for it. To say that one of the cases of
interest here is just ‘pragmatic ellipsis’ (whatever that might mean) is to con-
cede Stainton’s point, and is not a coherent alternative to it.
7.
Conclusions
The proposed semantic ellipsis account here shares, by design, both the strengths
and weaknesses of Stainton’s insightful discussions—the primary difference
being in where the labor is situated. For the primary cases of interest, the
predictions are identical; in other words, a ‘slot-filling’ approach with ap-
propriate semantic objects seems to work just as well in precisely the same
15
Worse, the only uses of apparently ‘free’ accusative (without obvious governor) in Greek
(as in German and Russian) are in time expressions, indicating time at or during (for ex-
ample, in Imastan eki tin Kyriaki/oli tin proigumeni evdhomadha (lit.) ‘We.were there the
Sunday
acc
/all the last week
acc
’).
manner as Stainton’s ‘pragmatic-representational’ account. By the same to-
ken, it inherits the weaknesses of the latter as well: questions about what
kinds of elements or representations the assignment function really assigns
to the values of variables (a variant on the internal-representations of Men-
talese or something else?), and runs risks of overgeneration in the same cases
(the ‘flags’ example). It seems to me, therefore, an empirical draw. At such
a point, the predilections of the theorist are determinative: those who wish
to maintain the Gricean division of labor between semantics and pragmatics
will favor my account and presumably feel comfortable positing the requi-
site variables in the semantic representations, while those analysts who favor
other accounts of meaning will opt for Stainton’s approach.
For both accounts, there remains a matter of division of labor: for some
data, a direct semantic ellipsis analysis applies to a ‘bare’ DP which ap-
pears in the unmarked nominative case by virtue of some sentence
syntactic
-
independent mechanism of case determination, but for other data, we need
access to a linguistic antecedent (overt, as in sluicing and fragment answers,
or implicit, as in the syntactic slot-filling cases of section 5.) If both strate-
gies are in principle available, how does one decide? What leads to the at-
tested judgments, in other words? The experimental results are that speakers
of e.g. German reject and do not produce the ‘wrong’ (nonaccusative) case
on sluiced wh-phrases or fragment answers when they occur in contexts like
the following:
(71)
a. Sie
she
hat
has
jemanden
someone.
ACC
eingeladen,
invited
aber
but
ich
I
weiss
know
nicht,
not
{
wen
who.
ACC
| *wer
who.
NOM
}.
‘She invited someone, but I don’t know who.’
b. Q: Wen
who.
ACC
hat
has
sie
she
eingeladen?
invited
A: { Einen
a.
ACC
| *Ein
a.
NOM
} Freund.
friend
Q: ‘Who did she invite?’ A: ‘A friend.’
But by the same token, there seems to have to be some way for their gram-
mars to generate and accept (72) as well.
(72)
Mein
my.
NOM
Vater!
father
‘My father!’
One possibility is to resurrect the notion of ‘sentence grammar’ vs. ‘dis-
course grammar’ (Williams 1977; see Fiengo and May 1994, Clifton and
Frazier 2006 and others for recent variants). The ‘sentence grammar’ takes
the narrow option of matching the antecedent, leading to the grammatical
connectivity effects like case when there is an antecedent. As Culicover and
Jackendoff 2005 point out, categorial features of linguistic expressions can
sometimes be accessed by anaphoric devices in the absence of explicit lin-
guistic mention of the objects denoted (as discussed in section 5 above).
I think the basic intuition is that when there is a parallel syntactic an-
tecedent available, it must be used (leading to the case and voice effects dis-
cussed). When a script is available, its modes must be used. When none is
available, then and only then can other mechanisms (for case assignment,
etc.) be used, and then and only then is the semantic ellipsis device triggered.
This reasoning patterns after the ‘semantic economy’ story of Kennedy
2007, who proposes a principle of Interpretive Economy: ‘Maximize the con-
tribution of the conventional meanings of the elements of a sentence to the
computation of its truth conditions.’ If such a principle is extended to the
present cases, it would be stated to require that one maximize the conven-
tional aspects of a context, where ‘conventional’ includes linguistic antecedents.
In sum, I think that Stainton is right in his basic claims, and that theories
of linguistic structure should take these data as explicanda, but I think there is
a way of construing the semantic composition rules that permits his account
to be accommodated in a semantic ellipsis approach.
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