Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction

   • Reinaldo Elugardo, Robert J. Stainton

   Pages 1-26

3. The Nature and Scope of Ellipsis

   1. Against Reconstruction in Ellipsis

      • Mary Dalrymple

      Pages 31-55

   2. The Semantics of Nominal Exclamatives

      • Paul Portner, Raffaella Zanuttini

      Pages 57-67

   3. Nonsententials in Minimalism

      • Ellen Barton, Ljiljana Progovac

      Pages 71-93

   4. A Note on Alleged Cases of Nonsentential Assertion

      • Peter Ludlow

      Pages 95-108

   5. On the Interpretation and Performance of Non-Sentential Assertions

      • Lenny Clapp

      Pages 109-129

   6. Non-Sentences, Implicature, and Success in Communication

      • Tim Kenyon

      Pages 131-147

   7. The Link between Sentences and ‘Assertion’: An Evolutionary Accident?

      • Andrew Carstairs-Mccarthy

      Pages 149-162

4. Implications

   1. Knowledge by Acquaintance and Meaning in Isolation

      • Andrew Botterell

      Pages 165-184

   2. Co-Extensive Theories and Unembedded Definite Descriptions

      • Alex Barber

      Pages 185-201

   3. The Ellipsis Account of Fiction-Talk

      • Marga Reimer

      Pages 203-215

   4. Quinean Interpretation and Anti-Vernacularism

      • Steven Davis

      Pages 217-235

   5. Saying What You Mean: Unarticulated Constituents and Communication

      • Emma Borg

      Pages 237-262

5. Back Matter

   Pages 263-266

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The papers in this volume address two main topics: Q1: What is the nature, and especially the scope, of ellipsis in natural l- guage? Q2: What are the linguistic/philosophical implications of what one takes the nature/scope of ellipsis to be? As will emerge below, each of these main topics includes a large sub-part that deals speci?cally with nonsentential speech. Within the ?rst main topic, Q1, there arises the sub-issueofwhethernonsententialspeechfallswithinthescopeofellipsisornot;within the second main topic, Q2, there arises the sub-issue of what linguistic/philosophical implications follow, if nonsentential speech does/does not count as ellipsis. I. THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF ELLIPSIS A. General Issue: How Many Natural Kinds? There are many things to which the label ‘ellipsis’ can be readily applied. But it’s quite unclear whether all of them belong in a single natural kind. To explain, consider a view, assumed in Stainton (2000), Stainton (2004a), and elsewhere. It is the view that there are fundamentally (at least) three very different things that readily get called ‘ellipsis’, each belonging to a distinct kind. First, there is the very broad phenomenon of a speaker omitting information which the hearer is expected to make use of in interpreting an utterance. Included therein, possibly as a special case, is the use of an abbreviated form of speech, when one could have used a more explicit expression. (See Neale (2000) and Sellars (1954) for more on this idea.

• Syntax
• communication
• evolution
• knowledge
• language
• linguistics
• natural language
• philosophy
• philosophy of language
• semantic
• semantics

• The University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA

  Reinaldo Elugardo

• University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

  Robert J. Stainton

Policies and ethics