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Stripping Isn’t so Mysterious, or Anomalous Scope, Either

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Formal Grammar 2018 (FG 2018)

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Abstract

This paper discusses a common variety of ellipsis phenomena in English called Stripping, with particular focus on the observation of so-called anomalous scope of negation and auxiliaries in Stripping sentences, and the difficulties that this data poses for existing analyses of Stripping. I then propose an extension to a recent Hybrid Type-Logical Categorical Grammar account of Gapping that adequately covers Stripping while straightforwardly accounting for the scope anomalies. This anomalous scope is a fascinating formal problem on the syntax-semantics interface that has been thus far overlooked in the stripping literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Assuming we aim for the reading of (2-b) in which Mary is an eater, which is a case of subject-stripping, rather than the reading in which John is a cannibal, which would be object-stripping.

  2. 2.

    One reviewer points out a potential problem with the underlying logic of the \(\upharpoonright \) connective. As discussed in [25], it can allow for undesired overgeneration, particularly in cases such as determiner gapping and stripping. The problem is that the \(\upharpoonright \)E rule only requires that the syntactic categories match, and is insensitive to the end linear order resulting from prosodic function-application. This means that it does not necessarily require the end result of prosodic function-application to match the order of the hypothetical expressions used in the \(\upharpoonright \)I rule to derive the original continuation in the first place.

    However, the author does not consider this criticism to be an existential threat to the present analysis for several reasons. First, while it is clear that the current formulation of the \(\upharpoonright \), coupled with its use in some lexical entries, is problematic, further research is required to determine if this issue can be solved through minor tweaks to the system or if it will require wholesale revisions of the underlying logic. Secondly, the present analysis, though couched HTLCG, is readily adaptable into other CG and TLG frameworks, such as the Displacement Type-Logical Grammar of [24], as noted by Morrill and Valentin in [25]. Thus, even if this observation proves a major obstacle for HTLCG as a framework in its current form, it would not necessarily invalidate the results of the current analysis.

  3. 3.

    This vertically-slashed version of slept can be derived simply via hypothetical reasoning:

    figure u
  4. 4.

    Thanks are due to Carl Pollard for these examples.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

    Daniel Puthawala

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  1. Daniel Puthawala
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Correspondence to Daniel Puthawala .

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  1. IRISA, Université de Rennes 1, Rennes, France

    Annie Foret

  2. Institut für Linguistik, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany

    Greg Kobele

  3. LORIA/Inria Nancy, Villers-lès-Nancy, France

    Sylvain Pogodalla

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Puthawala, D. (2018). Stripping Isn’t so Mysterious, or Anomalous Scope, Either. In: Foret, A., Kobele, G., Pogodalla, S. (eds) Formal Grammar 2018. FG 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10950. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57784-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-57784-4_6

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