It is generally assumed that ellipsis requires certain parallelism between the clause containing the ellips is and some antecedent clause. We argue that the parallelism requirement generated by ellipsis must be applied in accordance with discourse structure: a matching antecedent clause must be found that locally c-commands the clause containing the ellipsis in the discourse tree. We show that the claim makes several correct predictions concerning the interpretation of ellipsis, both in terms of the selection of the antecedent (in Sluicing and Verb Phrase Ellipsis), and in terms of the possible readings given a particular antecedent (in the "many-clause" puzzle and in Antecedent-Contained Deletion).

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The term ‘ellipsis ’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this paper, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer ’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all.

In this paper, we argue for a new discourse constraint on ellipsis resolution: ellipsis clauses must nd a matching antecedent that locally c-commands them in the discourse tree. We show: (i) that this discourse condition constrains the selection of antecedent in Sluicing and VP-ellipsis, and (ii) that it determines the distribution of sloppy/strict readings in the "Many-Clause Puzzle". Furthermore, when the examples are modied so that the discourse relations change, the interpretations change in precisely the way the local c-command condition predicts. In sum, the empirical data presented here are unexpected without the proposed discourse condition on ellipsis.

ing { the copied \him" must remain John 1 2.2 Sag's Account VPE is logically identical to VP antecedent, which is represented as a abstract. { walk ! x.walk(x) { love his cat ! x.love(x,x's cat) { love his cat ! x.love(x,his i 's cat) x.M is: The function that, when applied to some a, gives M , with a substituted for x A pronoun within VP either becomes a -bound variable or receives a referential index. All pronouns are potentially ambiguous. VPE Identity Condition: VPE must be alphabetic variant of antecedent VP. All free variables must be exactly the same. Bound variables can be renamed. John 1 loves his 1 cat: (two derivations) { John 1 , x.love(x,x's cat) ) love(John 1 ,John 1 's cat) { John 1 , x.love(x,his 1 's cat) ) love(John 1 ,John 1 's cat) Pick one of the possible VP representations, apply to Bill: { Bill 2 , x.love(x,x's cat) ) love(Bill 2 , Bill 2 's cat) { Bill 2 , x.love(x,his 1 's cat) ) love(Bill 2 , his 1 's cat) This cap

Abstract. Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) [2, 7] provides a dynamic semantics for discourse that exploits a rich notion of discourse structure. According to SDRT, a text is segmented into constituents related to each other by means of rhetorical relations; the resulting structure, known as a segmented discourse representation structure or SDRS has various semantic effects. This theory has shown how discourse structure makes contributions to the interpretation of a variety of linguistic phenomena, including tense, modality, presupposition, the interpretation of anaphoric pronouns and ellipsis. SDRT exploits dynamic semantics [20, 14] to interpret SDRSs. We investigate here the advantages of integrating SDRT within continuation style semantics of the sort developed in [17].