Ellipsis alternation june 20th

[Anne Abeillé anne.abeille@linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr [parislinguists]]

Chers collègues

dans le cadre de l'opération SA3 du labex EFL (axe 2),
> Joanna Nykiel (University Silesia)
> fera une présentation le vendredi 20 juin de 13h a 15h
SALLE 267 batiment Olympe de Gouges
8 rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris
> titre: Ellipis alternation in Eglish
> 
> résumé:
> I discuss an instance of syntactic variation which I refer to as ellipsis alternation. One of two elliptical (and semantically equivalent) variants may be selected in response to utterances like those in (1) and (2). One variant repeats the preposition present in the antecedent, and the other doesn’t.
> (1) A: Pat heard it from someone. B: Who?/From who?
> (2) A: Who can I hang out with? B: Me!/With me!
> One influential account of this variation posits sentential sources for such variants and connects their availability to the availability of preposition stranding in the sources, as in (3) and (4) (Merchant 2001, 2004).
> (3) Who did Pat hear it from?
> (4) Me you can hang out with.
> This account predicts that ellipsis alternation is cross-linguistically rare, because it’s limited to only those languages that allow preposition stranding.
> In this talk I ask whether ellipsis alternation is indeed subject to this syntactic constraint. I address this question by first exploring factors that affect the choice of variant in English, drawing on synchronic and diachronic corpus data. I further discuss experimental data from Polish (acceptability judgment studies and corpus study) and Norwegian (eye movement study and acceptability judgment study). The results strongly suggest that syntax is not involved in ellipsis alternation. Rather, three performance preferences affect the choice of variant, and their strength in individual languages shapes the distribution of the variants. I then discuss the implications of these results for theories of grammar. 
> 
> 
Joanna Nykiel
English Department
University of Silesia
E-mail: joanna.nykiel at us.edu.pl
Homepage: http://uranos.cto.us.edu.pl/~jnykiel


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/parislinguists/attachments/20140616/4a412c63/attachment.htm>