Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2016 / Towards a QUD-Based Analysis of Gapping Constructions

Towards a QUD-Based Analysis of Gapping Constructions

Paper · 2016 · Sang-Hee Park

Summary

The paper looks at Gapping, a kind of ellipsis in which a later clause loses its verb and sometimes more material, as in "Mary loves apples, and Tom, pears". It argues that properties usually treated as syntactic are really discourse-pragmatic. Three earlier families of analysis are tested against data: deletion, movement (verb raising out of conjoined VPs) and construction-based accounts. Each runs into trouble with some of the following:

  • gapped clauses that have no grammatical full-clause counterpart;
  • wide-scope readings of negation and modals;
  • a nominative subject occurring together with wide scope;
  • mismatches with extraction constraints.

The author also weakens two common assumptions. Against the Major Constituent Hypothesis, the paper uses preposition-complement and determiner-gapping remnants. Against the coordination-only restriction, it uses web-found examples with before and because. The proposal is formulated in HPSG, following Ginzburg & Sag and Ginzburg. The source clause is treated as a partial answer that keeps a Question Under Discussion open. The remnants of the gapped clause are focal elements, and the clause's meaning comes from beta-reducing the source's unfocused open proposition with those remnants. This places Gapping inside a general theory of fragment utterances.

Key points

  • The paper groups prior work into deletion-based (Ross, Sag, Hartmann, Chaves), movement-based (Johnson 2009/2014) and construction-based (Culicover & Jackendoff, Abeillé et al.) approaches.
  • Key problem data:
    • "Paul saw Leslie, but not Leslie Paul" and "or him that ice cream", where the remnant subject is accusative;
    • wide vs. distributive readings of "Ward can't eat caviar, and Sue, beans";
    • P-complement remnants, as in "Bill, syntax";
    • determiner gapping, as in "and cat, Alpo".
  • Native-speaker consultants judged the subordinate-clause gapping examples more acceptable when they carried pauses and contrastive pitch accent. The author takes this as evidence against purely syntactic constraints.
  • The new gapped phrase type has these features:
    • a mother HEAD value left underspecified, so it can combine with as well as and but not;
    • a MAX-QUD containing an FEC set of focal elements and an abstract Q;
    • two or more remnant daughters.
  • The analysis makes three predictions:
    • remnants must contrast in focus with their correlates;
    • case mismatch is allowed;
    • a passive source followed by an active-order gapped clause (the Casablanca/Chinatown example) is correctly ruled out.
  • The work is purely theoretical, with no corpus or quantitative evaluation. The effect of prosody is left for future research.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The elided clause's meaning is rebuilt by abstracting the unfocused part of the antecedent into an ordered lambda and applying the remnants in sequence, with no copying of syntax.
  • I2. Because the abstract is order-sensitive, a remnant pair that answers a differently ordered question (a passive source with active-order remnants) fails to compose, which explains why such sentences sound odd.
  • I3. A source clause is treated as a partial answer that leaves its question open, so later fragments resolve against that still-active question.
  • I4. The paper separates statistical tendencies (remnants tend to be major constituents) from hard constraints and tests each claimed rule against naturally occurring counterexamples.
  • I5. Prosody and contrastive focus are what license gapping, and in written text commas stand in for pauses.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): When the tree marks a gapping clause (e.g. UD orphan), prag could build the frame by reusing the source frame with its contrasted role slots emptied and filling them in order from the remnants, recording the derivation as an explanation.
  • I2 (frames): Role assignment for remnants should follow the source frame's argument order, including its voice, and should flag mismatches as low-confidence readings rather than silently swapping agent and patient.
  • I3 (world): The text world could keep an explicit stack of open questions, so that fragments and follow-up clauses in fables or dialogues attach to the right pending question.
  • I4 (learn): Silver-data rules and self-induced repair rules for ellipsis could be checked against small curated counterexample sets, used as negative controls, before they are promoted to hard constraints.
  • I5 (tree): Parser features or repair rules could treat the comma-separated "NP, NP" pattern after a conjunction or a subordinator like because/before as a gapping cue, instead of forcing an apposition or coordination analysis.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 4 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Neuroscience · 95 works Cognitive Neuroscience · 95 works

Cite

Cite as Sang-Hee Park. 2016. Towards a QUD-Based Analysis of Gapping Constructions. Proceedings of the 30th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation: Oral Papers.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{park2016qud,
  title = {{Towards a QUD-Based Analysis of Gapping Constructions}},
  author = {Sang-Hee Park},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation: Oral Papers},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/Y16-2028/}
}

References

32 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Andrew Kehler. 2002. Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar. CSLI. find
  2. Anne Abeillé, Gabriela Bı̂lbı̂ie, and Francois Mouret. 2013. A Romance perspective on Gapping constructions. In Romance in Construction Grammar, ed. H. Boas and F. Gonzalvez Garcia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Craige Roberts. 1996/2012. Information structure in discourse: towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Semantics & Pragmatics 5(6): 1-69. our card
  3. Daniel Büring. 2003. On D-trees, beans and B-accents. Linguistics and Philosophy, 26:511-545. find
  4. Ivan A. Sag. 1976. Deletion and logical form. Ph.D. Dissertation. MIT. find
  5. James D. McCawley. 1988. The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press. find
  6. James D. McCawley. 1993. Gapping with shared operators. In D. A. Peterson (ed.), Berkeley Linguistics Society, 245-253. University of California, Berkeley, California. ↗
  7. Jason Merchant. 2004. Fragments and Ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy, 27:661–738. ↗
  8. Jerry Hobbs. 1985. On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse. CSLI-85-37. find
  9. Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof. 1991. Dynamic Predicate Logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 14(1): 39–100. find
  10. John R. Ross. 1970. Gapping and the order of constituents. In M. Bierwisch and K. Heidolph (eds.), Progress in Linguistics, 249–259. The Hague: Mouton. find
  11. Jonathan Ginzburg and Ivan A. Sag. 2000. Interrogative investigations: the form, meaning and use of English interrogatives. Stanford: CSLI Publications. find
  12. Jonathan Ginzburg. 2012. The Interactive Stance: meaning for conversation. Oxford University Press, Oxford. find
  13. Jorge Hankamer. 1973. Unacceptable Ambiguity. Linguistic Inquiry, 4(1):17–68. find
  14. Katharina Hartmann. 2000. Right Node Raising and Gapping: Interface conditions on prosodic deletion. John Benjamins Publishing. ↗
  15. Kyle Johnson. 2009. Gapping is not (vP-) ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry, 40(2):289–328. ↗
  16. Kyle Johnson. 2014. Gapping. Ms., University of Massachusetts, Amherst. find
  17. Linton Wang, Eric McCready, and Nicholas Asher. 2006. Information dependency in Quantificational Subordination. Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics. Oxford: Elsevier, 267–304. ↗
  18. Mark J. Steedman. 1990. Gapping as constituent coordination. Linguistics and Philosophy 13(2):207–263. ↗
  19. Massimo Poesio and Alessandro Zucchi. 1992. On Telescoping. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theoty 2. find
  20. Matthew Reeve. 2014. If there’s anything cleft-ellipsis resembles, it’s (pseudo)gapping. In R. E. Santana-LaBarge (ed.), Proceedings of the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 351–360. find
  21. Muffy E. A. Siegel. 1984. Gapping and interpretation. Linguistic Inquiry, 15:523–530. find
  22. Nancy Levin and Ellen Prince. 1986. Gapping and causal implicature. Papers in Linguistics, 19, 351– 364. ↗
  23. Neal Whitman. 2010. Deriving wide-scoping operators in an associative Lambek categorial grammar. LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts. find
  24. Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford University Press. find
  25. Petra Hendriks. 2004. Coherence relations, ellipsis and contrastive topics. Journal of Semantics, 21(2): 133– 153. ↗
  26. Ray S. Jackendoff. 1971. Gapping and related rules. Linguistic Inquiry 2(1):21–35. find
  27. Richard A. Hudson. 1989. Gapping and grammatical relations. Journal of Linguistics, 25(1):57–94. ↗
  28. Mats E. Rooth. 1985. Association with Focus. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Massachusetts, Amherst. find
  29. Rui P. Chaves. 2005. A linearization-based approach to gapping. Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Formal Grammar and the 9th Meeting on Mathematics of Language, 1–14. CSLI. find
  30. Rui P. Chaves. 2007. Coordinate Structures: constraint-based syntax-semantics processing. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Lisbon. find
  31. Yusuke Kubota and Robert Levine. 2014. The scope anomaly of Gapping. In Proceedings of NELS, 44: 247–260. find
  32. Yusuke Kubota and Robert Levine. 2016. Gapping as hypothetical reasoning. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 34(1):107–156. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/park-2016-qud-based-analysis-gapping-constructions/