The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena
Yüklə 260,07 Kb. Pdf görüntüsü
|
b. * Hans. Hans
This is because German, unlike English, does not permit preposition- stranding under leftwards movement: (21) a. * Wem
whom. DAT
hast have
du you
mit with
gesprochen? spoken
(lit.) ‘Who did you speak with?’ b. * Hans Hans habe
have ich
I mit
with gesprochen. spoken (lit.) ‘Hans, I spoke with.’ The correlation between the obligatory presence of the preposition in (19b) and the necessity of pied-piping the preposition in overt movements such as in (21) is directly captured on the ellipsis account in Merchant 2004a, where it’s proposed that the short answer consists of a fragment which had under- gone a kind of movement to a clause-peripheral position with concomitant ellipsis of the clausal node under the landing site of the fragment. The result- ing sentence syntactic is given in (22), where F is a functional head which hosts the E(llipsis) feature which triggers nonpronunciation of its complement, here the clausal node TP. (22)
FP ¨ ¨ ¨ ¨ r r r r Hans 1 ¨ ¨ ¨ r r r F[E]
I spoke with t 1 For such cases, Stainton tends to agree (though he hedges a bit) that ellip- sis is involved, writing ‘some of [this] data reinforce my standing view that direct answers to immediately prior interrogatives may well involve genuine syntactic ellipsis’ (2006:137, with similar remarks on p. 144 and in Stainton 1997).
It’s important to note that to date, no-one has even hinted at how to account for these facts without using a theory of preposition-stranding, and no-one has ever proposed a theory of preposition-stranding that distinguishes Ger- man from English on anything but morphosyntactic grounds. In other words, whether the grammar of a language makes available preposition-stranding is an irreducibly syntactic fact about the language, not a semantic one, or a prag- matic one. (Whether a speaker in a given context will choose to make use of P-stranding of course is dependent on nonsyntactic factors; but even factors that favor P-stranding will be powerless in a language like German.) There is a language-internal effect of connectivity between the grammatical form of the short answer and some aspect of the form of the question. Another striking connectivity effect in short answers involves voice: what- ever voice is used by the questioner must underlie the answer, determining the form of the short answer. In German, this can be seen in both directions (pas- sive voice in the question, active in the answer and vice versa); in English, in only one direction. (23) Voice connectivity in short answers a. English Q: Who is sending you to Iraq? A: *By Bush. b. German i. Q: Wer who. NOM
hat has
den the
Jungen boy
untersucht? examined? A: * Von by einer a Psychologin. psychologist Q: ‘Who examined the boy? A: [intended:] ‘(He was exam- ined) by a psychologist.’ ii. Q: Von by wem
who. DAT
wurde was
der the
Junge boy
untersucht? examined
A: * Eine a Psychologin. psychologist. NOM
Q: ‘Who was the boy examined by?’ A: [intended:] ‘A psy- chologist (examined him).’ It is crucial to note that these effects emerge only when ellipsis is involved, and are not due to more general conditions on felicitous answers or discourse coherence, as the following control cases demonstrate. (24)
No voice connectivity in nonelliptical answers a. English Q: Who is sending you to Iraq? A: I’m being sent by Bush. b. German i. Q: Wer who. NOM
hat has
den the
Jungen boy
untersucht? examined? A: Er he
was von
by einer
a Psychologin psychologist untersucht. examined Q: ‘Who examined the boy?’ A: ‘He was examined by a psy- chologist.’ ii. Q: Von by wem
who. DAT
wurde was
der the
Junge boy
untersucht? examined
A: Eine a Psychologin psychologist. NOM
hat examined
ihn him
untersucht. Q: ‘Who was the boy examined by?’ A: ‘A psychologist ex- amined him.’ Such connectivity effects form the best argument that there is syntactic ellipsis involved in fragment answers, and that the unpronounced syntax must be identical in some way to the syntax in the question asked. These effects tell strongly against approaches like Ginzburg and Sag’s 2000 and Culicover and Jackendoff’s 2005, which posit no syntax internal ellipsis sites at all (see Merchant 2008b for discussion). While this conclusion continues to appear to me to be inescapable, there remain certain issues with fragment answers that have to be addressed on this analysis as well. The first and in my view most serious issue concerns the lack of island effects in certain contexts. Apparent movement sensitivities to islands are variable under ellipsis. So while (25) shows a standard island effect (namely illicit wh-extraction out of a relative clause), and this effect persists when VP-ellipsis is applied to the higher VP as in (27), it is famously absent in an equivalent sluicing case like (26) (see Merchant 2001 for discussion and references). In Merchant 2008a I propose to capture this distinction by mak- ing reference to the variable amount of structure elided in the two cases: in sluicing, more, in VP-ellipsis, less. If the grammatical mechanisms that trig- ger island deviancies are encoded along the path of extraction (for example, through the use of illicit intermediate traces, here marked *t), then ellipsis can variably eliminate these from representation that is pronounced. If a higher node is elided (as in sluicing), so will all *ts be; while if a lower node is Yüklə 260,07 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|