VP ellipsis

[Shravan Vasishth]

IMHO, it might be a good idea if people took a little time out to pay
attention to methodology before diving into analyses. It's just not good
enough for me that A thinks a sentence is bad but B thinks it's OK,
resulting in the conclusion that the sentence must really be
"questionable".

There's a lot of literature out there that shows you how to gather data
scientifically.  We cannot continue to ignore that whole body of work any
more (Cowart and Schuetze's books for starters, but the entire
experimental methods literature available in psycholinguistics is relevant
to syntacticians working with real languages.)

On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, James A. Crippen wrote:

> On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Ivan A. Sag wrote:
>
> > Hi Tibor,
> >
> > > I have a simple question concerning VP ellipsis (Ivan listen!):
> >
> > I'm listening...
> >
> > > As a continuation of (1), which of the cases in (2) are grammatical?
> > >
> > > (1) John may have been sleeping, and
> > >
> > > (2) a. Mary, too.
> > >     b. Mary may, too.
> > >     c. Mary may have, too.
> > >     d. Mary may have been, too.
> >
> > (2b) is questionable, but there may be analogous examples that are
> > well formed, e.g. with should or could instead of may.
>
> (2b) must certainly be questionable since it reads okay to me but not you.
> Maybe it's the punctuation.  Take out the comma and read it again, with no
> pause.  Anyhow, I think I've seen this ellipsis before in common usage.
> A search of the 'Internet corpus' would probably find an example.
>
> 'james
>
>

--
Shravan Vasishth
http://ling.ohio-state.edu/~vasishth