819 notes January 25, 2022

Tuesday 2:00-5:00 (with a break half-way, of course)
1108B MMH

As you all know, I like discussion and debate. I will have plenty to say, but I want all of you to fully participate too. And for that purpose, I don’t care if you are registered for the course or not. All of you know relevant things that the rest of us (including me) don’t. So feel free to ask any questions, bring up any phenomena, etc. We will all be the better for it.

I plan to be around
Most Monday afternoons
Most Tuesday mornings
Wednesdays

<And I’m almost always available by e-mail.>

I will post lots of readings, and some handouts and notes. Much of the stuff will be in protected folders. The credentials are linguser and aspects! [A couple of things might be in the pdf locker. For that, use your own UMD credentials where it asks for CAS log-in.]

If you are registered the requirements are:
-Term paper (on any topic connected with ellipsis in any way)
-Class presentation (probably connected with your paper topic, or else summarizing some article or book/thesis chapter on ellipsis)
<<If you aren’t registered and would like to give a presentation, we can make that happen. Just let me know>>
<<<Speaking of possible presentations by non-registered people, what would you think about presentations (by Zoom) of two very recent grads who did dissertations about ellipsis: Rodrigo Ranero (2021) and Gesoel Mendes (2020)?>>>

Subject matter:

-The nature of ellipsis: PF deletion or LF copying or WYSIWYG? All of these have been proposed though not necessarily under these names; and proposals generally the same have often varied in details:
-So in early transformational work, ellipsis was syntactic deletion, a transformation that interacted with other transformations. We will explore Chomsky’s LSLT discussion a bit. Some recent work, including UMD grad Dongwoo Park's 2017 thesis resurrects the idea.
-For (what came to be called) LF copying, there were at least two distinct instantiations: Foe, e.g., VP ellipsis, the ellipsis site is just an empty VP in the syntax, proposed by Jackendoff (1972); OR, as proposed by Wasow (1972), it is a fully articulated syntactic structure but without lexical insertion.

-Properties of several kinds of ellipsis that we will explore:
-VP ellipsis [One continuing mystery is why it’s so rare among the languages of the world]
I will like this seminar and you will like this seminar too
-Sluicing Named and investigated in Ross’s classic 1969 paper “Guess Who?”
Somebody just left -- guess who just left.
*John just left. I am unhappy that John just left.
-Multiple Sluicing?
?Someone will talk about something but I’m not sure who will talk about what
-Pseudogapping Most famously investigated in detail by Nancy Levin in her 1979 Ohio State U. diss. The first investigation, as far as I know, was in a 1977 paper by Gregory Stump, who coined the name.
When you inform John, I will inform Mary
-Antecedent Contained Deletion (ACD) First examined by Bouton (1970). Discussed further by May (1985), who offered what became a standard account.
Dulles suspected everyone Angleton did
<The problem is that we have VP-ellipsis, yet the only apparent VP antecedent is “suspected everyone Angleton did”. But then we seem to have an infinite regress.>

-Some kinds of ellipsis that (as of right now) I won’t have much to say about:
-NP ellipsis (what used to be called Nʹ deletion prior to the widespread acceptance of the DP hypothesis)
I’ll discuss Chomsky’s theory of ellipsis if you’ll discuss Merchant’s theory of ellipsis
-Gapping First discussed in detail by Ross (1970) and Jackendoff (1971)
Tom has a pistol, and Dick has a sword
-'Headless XP ellipsis' (where the head of XP has moved out) - Is it possible? If not, why not?
-The proper formulation of the 'identity' requirement: semantic, formal, some combination?

-'Licensing' of ellipsis Even when there is a suitable antecedent, and even when the specific ellipsis operation exists in the language, there still seems to be a requrement for a ‘licensor’.

-Repair by ellipsis: Does it exist? Original discussion by Ross (1969), then follow-up in several papers of mine and Merchant’s thesis and book, Merchant (1999/2001). A whole industry then developed. If there is repair, what kinds of violations can/can't be repaired by ellipsis? Nakao (2009), a UMD thesis, has good discussion of this question.
*Irv and someone were dancing together, but I don't know who Irv and were dancing together
(??)Irv and someone were dancing together, but I don't know who