Ellipsis in Languages of the Caucasus

This chapter deals with ellipsis, a phenomenon whereby some expected material goes missing in an utterance. The chapter overviews types of ellipsis frequently addressed in the literature: ellipsis in the noun phrase; argument omission; VP ellipsis; modal complement ellipsis; ellipsis in complex predicates; gapping, pseudogapping, and right node raising; ellipsis in comparative constructions, stripping; and ellipsis involving negation, sluicing and its generalizations, and fragment answers. It proceeds to review the occurrence of, and peculiarities exhibited by, these ellipsis varieties in a sample of the languages of the Caucasus. A number of ellipsis varieties that have not been earlier discussed in the literature but are present in some languages of the Caucasus are addressed as well. The data show that the languages of the Caucasus do not show a uniform typological profile as far as ellipsis is concerned. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the relevance of the presented data for theories of ellipsis.

Syntactic representation of null arguments

Focusing on definite-argument drop, this chapter puts forward the hypothesis that null arguments are minimally represented as [nPn] and maximally as a fully-fledged pronoun ([DP D [PersP Pers [NumP Num [nPn]]]] or [PersP Pers [NumP Num [nPn]]]). The (un)availability of such arguments in a language is a consequence of independent features of its grammar: the lexical specification of its nominalizing n heads (esp. their association with phonetic material) and the avaialbility of post-syntactic type-shifting operations (esp. ι‎). The working of this approach is illustrated mostly with data from English, Polish, and Kashubian. The two latter languages are argued here to differ from English with respect to the inflectional properties of their nouns, as well as with respect to the mechanisms of NP interpretation. The chapter discusses the predictions thehypothesis makes about the identity of null arguments with respect to cross-linguistic variation in the patterns of argument omission.

Language interaction effects in bimodal bilingualism

The focus of the paper is a phenomenon well documented in both monolingual and bilingual English acquisition: argument omission. Previous studies have shown that bilinguals acquiring a null and a non-null argument language simultaneously tend to exhibit unidirectional cross-language interaction effects — the non-null argument language remains unaffected but over-suppliance of overt elements in the null argument language is observed. Here subject and object omission in both ASL (null argument) and English (non-null argument) of young ASL-English bilinguals is examined. Results demonstrate that in spontaneous English production, ASL-English bilinguals omit subjects and objects to a higher rate, for longer, and in unexpected environments when compared with English monolinguals and bilinguals; no effect on ASL is observed. Findings also show that the children differentiate between their two languages — rates of argument omission in English are different during ASL vs. English target sessions differ. Implications for the general theory of bilingual effects are offered.

Subject and object omission in children's early transitive constructions: A discourse-pragmatic approach

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates discourse effects on the provision of both subjects and objects and investigates whether pragmatic discourse features govern the realization/omission of both constituents alike. In an elicitation study, we examined how the discourse-pragmatic feature contrast, as applied to the subject, verb, or object of a transitive utterance affected the provision of elements in the remainder of the sentence when all elements were previously introduced. The results showed that 3.5-year-old children were more likely to realize a contrasted argument with a lexical noun but more likely to omit the argument when it was not part of a contrast, regardless of its subject or object status. This suggests that contrast presents a unifying discourse feature for argument omission in language development.

The Dative Alternation in Norwegian Child Language

Research has shown that givenness is one of several factors that influence the choice of word order with the Dative Alternation in languages such as English. This paper investigates to what extent Norwegian children between the ages of 4;2 and 6;0 are sensitive to this factor in production. In order to test this, an experiment was carried out in which the children were prompted to produce structures involving ditransitive verbs when either the Theme or the Recipient was given. The results show that the children are sensitive to the impact of givenness, but while this is expressed through the choice of word order in Theme-given contexts (yielding the prepositional dative), it is expressed by argument omission in the Recipient-given contexts (resulting in one-argument responses with only the Theme overtly produced).

A constructional account of genre-based argument omissions

Authors like Fillmore 1986 and Goldberg 2006 have made a strong case for regarding argument omission in English as a lexical and construction-based affordance rather than one based on general semantico-pragmatic constraints. They do not, however, address the question of how grammatical restrictions on null complementation might interact with broader narrative conventions, in particular those of genre. In this paper, we attempt to remedy this oversight by presenting a comprehensive overview of genre-based argument omissions and offering a construction-based analysis of genre-based omission conventions. We consider five genre-based omission types: instructional imperatives (Culy 1996, Bender 1999), labelese, diary style (Haegeman 1990), match reports (Ruppenhofer 2004) and quotative clauses. We show that these omission types share important traits; all, for example, have anaphoric rather than indefinite construals. We also show, however, that the omission types differ from each other in idiosyncratic ways. We then address several interrelated representational problems posed by the grammatical treatment of genre-based omissions. For example, the constructions that represent genre-based omission conventions must interact with the lexical entries of verbs, many of which do not generally permit omitted arguments. Accordingly, we offer constructional analyses of genre-based omissions that allow constructions to override lexical valence constraints.