Fragments : studies in ellipsis and gapping ; [this collection contains papers presented at the SOAS Ellipsis Workshop held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in September 1996

This volume contains essays on ellipsis -- the omission of understood words from a sentence -- and the closely related phenomena of gapping. This volume presents work by leading researchers on syntactic, semantic and computational aspects of ellipsis. The chapters bring together a variety of theoretical perspectives and examine a range of cross-linguistic phenomena involving ellipsis in Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, and in English. This volume will be of interest to syntacticians, semanticists, computational linguists, and cognitive scientists. This volume contains essays on ellipsis - the omission of understood words or grammatical items from a sentence - and the closely related syntactic phenomena of conjunction and gapping. Ellipsis poses interesting challenges for linguists because speakers are expressing something that is not present in their words. This volume not only addresses the three perspectives resulting from recent research: Chomsky's syntactic Government and Binding approach, the semantic theories, and the processing accounts, but it also examines the cross-linguistic aspects of ellipsis by comparing the possibilities for a given type of elided structure in Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, and in English. This volume will be of interest to both semanticists and syntacticians