Ellipsis and Missing Objects
Ellipsis and Missing Objects
Ellipsis phenomena in natural language involve instances of meaning without sound as they do, and their interpretation requires the presence of some covert structure. The central issue for a theory of ellipsis is to determine how this structure is constructed. Within generative grammar, two competing theories have been proposed: a PF deletion approach and an interpretive approach. In the former, the ellipsis results from the deletion of a fully specified construct in forming PF, whereas in the latter, the ellipsis site contains a lexically empty categorial structure whose interpretation is derived from a corresponding structure containing lexical material. Drawing on data from Mandarin Chinese, this chapter argues in favor of the interpretive approach. It considers two types of elliptical constructions in Chinese: the Aux-construction, in which ellipsis arises after an auxiliary in the second conjunct, and the V-construction, in which ellipsis involves a missing object.
Keywords: ellipsis, natural language, generative grammar, missing object, Mandarin Chinese, Aux-construction, V-construction, PF deletion approach, interpretive approach
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
