A compositional account of VP ellipsis

Author: Markus Egg and Katrin Erk

Editor:

We present an approach to VP ellipsis that allows the direct derivation of source and target sentences (the former need not be unique) during semantic construction. Specific syntactic constituent structures are associated with ellipsis potential, which can then be discharged by pro-verbs like 'did (too)'. The determination of source and target sentence, which is done with semantic features in an HPSG framework, is coupled with a comprehensive analysis of ellipsis, which also handles its interaction with scope and anaphora.