We are happy to announce a talk by Volker Struckmeier (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
Title: The many factors of ellipsis reconstruction – a multi-layered model
Date: April 20, 2023
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
Many theories try to explain the phenomenon of ellipsis interpretation and formation from the viewpoint of (mostly) single levels of linguistic description. All of these models have certain strong points.These successes in deriving empirical properties in ellipsis, in turn, makes their adherents attempt to specify more and more analytical restrictions and options in essentially the same framework, and with the same theoretical vocabulary, which yielded the initial advances. I will argue in this talk, that we should avoid overly specific analyses in which all (or almost all) relevant ellipsis descriptions stem from too few linguistic levels of representation. Instead of such single-level theories, I will propose an approach to ellipsis analysis which tries to combine strong points from each approach in a multi-layered architecture – but crucially, without any individual level issueing too many restrictions all on its own. This approach can, I hope, be extended in the future, not only to avoid increasingly baroque single-level analyses, but also to increase the empirical coverage of ellipsis theories, as well as delivering more satisfying explanations as to why ellipsis seems to follow (only apparently?) complex restrictions.