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Matthew Barros
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2023) 54 (4): 649–684.
Published: 23 June 2023
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We provide an account of clause-boundedness in multiple sluicing that also captures its exceptions. Clause-boundedness arises whenever an embedded clause’s subject is not coreferential with a topical discourse referent in the embedding clause. Our account ties clause-boundedness to discourse factors. We discuss implementations that import sensitivity to information structure into the syntax, and compare our approach with recent work—in particular, Grano and Lasnik 2018 and “short source” accounts (most recently, Abels and Dayal 2017 , 2021 )—and demonstrate that these accounts both under- and overgenerate. The empirical coverage of our account argues against purely syntacticized agreement-based approaches to clause-boundedness.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2021) 52 (4): 867–880.
Published: 25 October 2021
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On the basis of certain semantic intuitions, Barros (2012) argues that ellipsis does not require structural isomorphism between elided structure and its antecedent. We tackle this claim. Semantic intuitions cannot be a pointer to the analysis of silent structure. We provide empirical evidence that raises the question of to what extent semantic intuitions about plausible articulable syntax must inform one’s analysis of silent structure. We conclude that the answer to this question must be crosslinguistically informed. We conjecture that ellipsis introduces ellipsis-specific interpretive mechanisms, so that intuitions about “how the unelided structure would be interpreted” are not empirically relevant.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2018) 49 (4): 781–812.
Published: 01 October 2018
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This article defends a semantic identity account of ellipsis licensing. The argument comes from examples of multiple sluicing, especially from Russian. Concentrating on antecedents that contain two quantified statements, we uncover a surprising asymmetry: surface scope antecedents can license a multiple sluice, but inverse scope antecedents cannot. We explain this finding in terms of semantic accounts of ellipsis licensing, where ellipsis is licensed when the sluice corresponds to an (implicit) question under discussion. We show that QUDs cannot be computed from the truth-conditional content of the antecedents alone; instead, they must be computed only after (scalar) implicatures have been calculated and added to the common ground, along with the context of utterance. We further discuss the commitments required of syntactic/LF identity accounts of ellipsis licensing in order to accommodate multiple sluicing with quantified antecedents, and argue that such accounts are practically untenable.