We present a new method for characterizing the interpretive possibilities generated by elliptical constructions in natural language. Unlike previous analyses, which postulate ambiguity of interpretation or derivation in the full clause source of the ellipsis, our analysis requires no such hidden ambiguity. Further, the analysis follows relatively directly from an abstract statement of the ellipsis interpretation problem. It predicts correctly a wide range of interactions between ellipsis and other semantic phenomena such as quantifier scope and bound anaphora. Finally, although the analysis itself is stated nonprocedurally, it admits of a direct computational method for generating interpretations. This article is available through the Computation and Language E-Print Archive as cmp-lg/9503008, and also appears in Linguistics and Philosophy 14(4):399–452. cmp-lg/9503008 Ellipsis and Higher-Order Unification 1

The central claim of this dissertation is that an elliptical VP is a proform. This claim has two primary consequences: first, the elliptical VP can have no internal syntactic structure. Second, the interpretation of VP ellipsis must be governed by the same general conditions governing other proforms, such as pronouns. The basic condition governing the interpretation of a proform is that it must be semantically identified with its antecedent. A computational model is described in which this identification is mediated by store and retrieve operations defined with respect to a discourse model. Because VP ellipsis is treated on a par with other proforms, the ambiguity arising from “sloppy identity ” becomes epiphenomenal, resulting from the fact that the store and retrieve operations are freely ordered. A primary argument for the proform theory of VP ellipsis concerns syntactic constraints on variables within the antecedent. I examine many different types of variables, including reflexives, reciprocals, negative polarity items, and wh-traces. In all these cases, syntactic constraints are not respected under ellipsis. This indicates that the relation governing VP ellipsis is semantic rather than syntactic. In further support of the proform theory, I show that there is a striking similarity in the antecedence possibilities for VP ellipsis and those for pronouns. Two

In this thesis, we present analyses and algorithms for resolving a variety of cohesive phenomena in natural language, including VP-ellipsis, gapping, event reference, tense, and pronominal reference. Past work has attempted to explain the complicated behavior of these expressions with theories that operate within a single module of language processing. We argue that such approaches cannot be maintained; in particular, the data we present strongly suggest that the nature of the coherence relation operative between clauses needs to be taken into account. We provide a theory of coherence relations and the discourse inference processes that underly their recognition. We utilize this theory to break the deadlock between syntactic and semantic approaches to resolving VP-ellipsis. We show that the data exhibits a pattern with respect to our categorization of coherence relations, and present an account which predicts this pattern. We extend our analysis to gapping and event reference, and sho...

This paper reports on an empirically based system that automatically resolves VP ellipsis in the 644 examples identified in the parsed Penn Treebank. The results reported here represent the first systematic corpus-based study of VP ellipsis resolution, and the performance of the system is comparable to the best existing systems for pronoun resolution. The methodology and utilities described can be applied to other discourse-processing problems, such as other forms of ellipsis and anaphora resolution. The system determines potential antecedents for ellipsis by applying syntactic constraints, and these antecedents are ranked by combining structural and discourse preference factors such as recency, clausal relations, and parallelism. The system is evaluated by comparing its output to the choices of human coders. The system achieves a success rate of 94.8%, where success is defined as sharing of a head between the system choice and the coder choice, while a baseline recency-based scheme achieves a success rate o,I:75.0 % by this measure. Other criteria for success are also examined. When success is defined as an exact, word-for-word match with the coder choice, the system performs with 76.0 % accuracy, and the baseline approach achieves only 14.6% accuracy. Analysis of the individual components of the system shows that each of the structural and discourse constraints used are strong predictors of the antecedent of VP ellipsis. 1.

this paper would be consistent with an identity condition defined at Surface Structure (SS), Logical Form(LF), or at the level of Discourse Representation Structure (DRS). For concretehess, we describe two possible identity conditions, at LF and DRS

this paper would be consistent with an identity condition defined at Surface Structure (SS), Logical Form(LF), or at the level of Discourse Representation Structure (DRS). For concreteness, we describe two possible identity conditions, at LF and DRS. 2.1 LF Recovery Condition

this paper, we will use the equational analysis of Dalrymple, Shieber, and Pereira (1991, henceforth dsp) as the exemplar of these approaches. In this account, the uniformity is specified by the solving of a certain equation in which, roughly speaking, the meaning of the source sentence as a whole is equated with the meaning of the target VP as applied to the meanings of the elements in the source that are parallel to overt elements in the target. For sentence (2a), this identity is captured by equation (4a), which under suitable assumptions has one solution for the meaning P of the elided VP, namely that in (4b). For sentence (3a), this identity is captured by equation (4c), which under suitable assumptions has two solutions for the meaning P of the elided VP, namely those in (4d) and (4e). In the equational account, the dependency between anaphoric relationships in source and target follows immediately from the mechanism used for constructing and solving the equations. More generally for source-determined analyses, the dependency follows from the method for determining anaphoric or coreference relationships in the target uniformly from those in the source. (4) a. love(ivan; mother(kris)) = P (ivan) b. P = x:love(x; mother(kris))

this paper, we present an analysis of identifier so based on the informational structure of the discourse in which it is used. Drawing upon a large corpus of naturally occurring data, we show that anaphoric expressions containing so impose a set of constraints on the information status of their

This thesis deals with the underspecified semantic representation and resolution of ellipsis. We focus on the interaction of Verb Phrase Ellipsis (henceforth VPE) and anaphora. In particular, we address the distribution of strict and sloppy readings in these phenomena and present an analysis to explain it. This analysis is integrated into a framework that enables a uniform treatment of semantically underspecified information and parallelism phenomena in discourse. The analysis put forward in this thesis makes correct predictions about the strict and sloppy readings of a series of problematic cases in the literature. It overcomes undergeneration or overgeneration problems. We use linking relations between anaphoric pronouns and their antecedents and claim that the interaction between linking relations and the parallelism requirement in VPE results in strict and sloppy readings. The analysis presented in this thesis agrees with the proposals in (Kehler 1995

It has been commonly assumed since Chomsky (1981) that the distribution of reflexive pronouns is subject to Binding Condition A. Reinhart and Reuland (1993) formulate Condition A in terms of the notion of “syntactic predicate. ” The proposal I will develop in this paper is to factor out semantic and syntactic conditions on the occurrence of reflexive pronouns and to reduce them to independently motivated semantic and syntactic mechanisms. The semantic part is attributed to a theory of semantic composition recently developed by Chung and Ladusaw (2004), while the syntactic residue falls into the proper characterization of syntactic chains, as proposed by Reinhart and Reuland (1993) and Reuland (2001). To the extent that this approach is successful, Binding Condition A is rendered superfluous. * 1.