Ellipsis (linguistics) - Theoretical Challenges

Theoretical Challenges

Theoretical accounts of ellipsis struggle. One reason why they struggle is that the elided material of many instances of ellipsis (e.g. the subscripted material above) often does not qualify as a constituent, the constituent being the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis associated with phrase structure grammars. What this means is that formal accounts of ellipsis must seek some way of accounting for the fact that many of the ellipsis mechanisms enumerated above can elide word combinations that do not qualify as any recognizable unit of (phrase structure) syntax.

One widespread approach to the challenge is to assume movement (or some notion akin to movement). What happens is that remnants are moved out of a greater constituent first so that the greater constituent can then be elided in full. By assuming movement first and ellipsis second, a theory of syntax can be maintained that continues to build on the constituent as the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis.

Another, more recent approach states that the challenges posed by ellipsis to phrase structure theories of syntax are due precisely to the phrase structure component of the grammar. In other words, the difficulties facing phrase structure theories are due the theoretical prerequisite that syntactic structure be analyzed in terms of the constituents associated with constituency grammars (= phrase structure grammars). If the theory departs from phrase structures and acknowledges the dependency structures of dependency grammars instead, the ability to acknowledge a different sort of syntactic unit as fundamental opens the door to a much more parsimonious theory of ellipsis. This unit is the catena. The assumption is now that ellipsis mechanisms are eliding catenae, whereby many of these catenae fail to qualify constituents. In this manner, the need to posit movement to "rectify" much of the ellipsis data disappears.