Ellipsis

Abstract

Ellipsis in linguistics refers to a construction whose phonological form is missing relative to the form that construction should have considering the meaning it denotes. Mismatch between form and meaning requires that meaning associated with the gap be somehow recoverable; in that sense, ellipsis differs from deletion, such as deletion of features. In general, ellipsis requires the missing Phonetic Form (PF) to denote information that is given from a linguistic context. Thus, ellipsis is a form of marking givenness, which in turn can be argued to be a reflex of presuppositionality, and can be classified as a type of anaphora. Existence of presuppositions is a universal language trait, so it is not surprising that, as far as we know, there are no languages that lack ellipsis constructions altogether. However, there is cross-linguistic variability as to what can be elided, and what cannot be elided. This suggests that ellipsis interacts with modules of grammar that are sensitive to language variation. Two predominant schools of thought assume that either we have lexical variation as to what silent pro-forms languages can have, or we have a complex interaction of syntax, semantics, and prosody that generates different forms of ellipsis. The latter approach requires that, at some level of the grammar, there is an abstract enough representation of the ellipsis site so that it can be licensed as an anaphor that is associated with a clear antecedent in the linguistic signal. A lot of research has been devoted to establish the appropriate level at which the elided anaphor can be structurally identified with its antecedent. This research has raised many interesting questions about the nature of the syntax-semantics interface, as well as to the syntax-prosody interface, and the possible existence of a prosody-semantics interface. These include, among others, questions such as: (i) Is there a fully-fledged syntactic structure in the elided anaphor? (ii) What licenses ellipsis remnants: movement, focus, prosody, all the above? (iii) What are the identity conditions that need to hold between an elided anaphor and its linguistic antecedent? Attempts at answering these and other questions has led to some fruitful and exciting research that has impacted our understanding of how language works.