[Lingtyp] Typology of sentence fragments

[Juergen Bohnemeyer]

Dear Emily – One relevant instance of typological variation that has always impressed me greatly, and that has been noted by various people over the years (e.g., Launey 2004: 57-59), but has to my knowledge never received more sustained attention, is the absence of ellipsis from profoundly head-marking languages.

This is “simply” a consequence of the fact that heads represent their complements/arguments anaphorically in such languages, so omission of the latter does not result in syntactically incomplete expressions. Of course, this makes perfect sense given the functional proximity between anaphora and ellipsis (Halliday & Hasan 1976).

I assume the same (no ellipsis) holds for zero-anaphora languages such as Japanese, but am not positive there.

HTH! – Juergen

Halliday, M. A. K., & R. Hasan. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Launey, M. (2004). The features of omnipredicativity in Classical Nahuatl. STUF 57(1): 49-69.

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Emily M. Bender <ebender at uw.edu>
Date: Monday, April 24, 2023 at 3:26 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Typology of sentence fragments
Dear all,

Has anyone looked at sentence fragments from a typological perspective? Do languages typically allow the same kinds of constituents to occur as felicitous stand-alone utterances? Do they tend to occur with the same discourse functions?

Thank you,
Emily

--
Emily M. Bender (she/her)
Department of Linguistics
University of Washington
Fedi: @emilymbender at dair-community.social
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