The Structure and Interpretation of Discourse: Evidence from Ellipsis

Beginning with early work such as Sag (76), the interpretation of
ellipsis has been an enduring preoccupation of linguistics research.
According to Sag's account, the facts of ellipsis reflect logical
aspects of the representation of pronouns, which are ambiguous between
a bound and referential reading. On this influential view, ellipsis
reveals an intricate machinery of lambda binding, pronoun indexing,
and scope relations. Subsequent research has shed doubt on this
pleasing picture -- it has been shown that ellipsis interpretation is
somewhat less well-behaved than Sag's theory permits. At the same
time, while Sag's theory was developed in a framework that treated the
logical form of sentences in isolation, subsequent research has lead
to a variety of perspectives which can encompass the interpretation of
multi-sentence discourse.

In this talk I will pursue this shift in perspective, and suggest that
ellipsis is revealing in a rather different sense than suggested by
Sag: instead of providing insight into the intricacies of the logical
form of sentences, ellipsis might be a window onto the general
mechanisms governing the structure and interpretation of
multi-sentence discourse. I will present a variety of evidence that
ellipsis interpretation is strongly constrained by discourse
structure; in particular, I will argue that parallelism constraints
must be applied in accordance with discourse structure. I will
consider two approaches to inter-sentential interpretation: the Etype
approach and DRT. I will show that, while both approaches permit
solutions to some empirical problems alluded to above, they each have
their own problems, and I will conclude by sketching a new approach
which combines virtues of both the Etype account and DRT.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact:

Katrin Erk

This seminar series is jointly organized by the Department of
Computational Linguistics and Phonetics and the European Post-Graduate
College in Language Technology and Cognitive Systems.

A current version of the program for this term can be found at:

http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/colloquium/