Citation Context

... in the ellipsis site in big ellipses. However, in small ellipses, because the voice head is not contained in the ellipsis site, VMM is allowed. Within small ellipses, discourse-level effects act as a heuristic, ordering sentences containing small ellipsis on a scale of acceptability. This heuristic can be thought of as a preference for the cause/effect coherence relation over the resemblance relation between the antecedent and the elided material. Additionally, our results have significant implications for approaches to ellipsis which rely on principles of information-structure. For example, Kertz (2012) proposes an account of ellipsis which argues that general information-structural principles not specific to ellipsis – such as focus structure and topic structure – can explain the VMM facts. However, because such accounts rely on principles not specific to ellipsis, they predict a difference between conditions in the non-elliptical sentences as well as in the elliptical ones. The lack of any effects in our non-elliptical conditions therefore poses a potential problem for such information-structural accounts, which warrants further investigation. One slightly surprising aspect of our results,...