Auxiliary Reduction: it all depends on the context

[Dennis R. Preston]

>While I suspect that arnold is right to seek for phrase structure
>generalizations and good behavior of certain related morphophonemic
>processes in most cases, I wonder if the search for a integrated
>general account of such discourse ellipsis facts will be fruitful.
>Seems to me that, given an appropriate discourse context, amost any
>element might appear.


Teacher: What are these things?

Kid: A ball, a doggie, a..,a...

Teacher: A...

But I would not go on to seek integration of that performance with
almost anything else I know about articles (except to predict what
sort of item the teacher expected to find in the post-a slot), and
bare articles are surely as rare as contractions in phrase final
position.

dInIs.






>one of the better-studied features of english is Auxiliary Reduction
>(or Contraction), and one thing that's been known about AuxRed for a
>long time is that it's inapplicable in a large collection of
>phrase-final contexts, for instance in cases like the following:
>
>We should leave now.  Well, I know I am / *I'm.  And I hope you are /
>*you're, too.
>
>but now I come across things like the following, from the CSI tv
>series.  in this scene, a CSI investigator, whose name is Kitty X (for
>some X i didn't catch) is introducing herself to a complainant:
>
>Kitty X, criminal investigator.  And you're?
>
>technically, "you're" here is phrase-final, in fact sentence-final.
>but what we have here is a kind of discourse ellipsis, with a final
>rising intonation indicating that kitty's question is an invitation for
>her interlocutor to fill in the blanks: "I'm NN."  this is just fine.
>
>now, how to fit this observation into a more general account of the
>conditions on AuxRed (as in the 1997 Pullum & Zwicky LSA paper whose
>abstract can be found in the december LSA Bulletin), that's another
>question.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages
A-740 Wells Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: (517) 432-3099
Fax: (517) 432-2736
preston at msu.edu