Fragments and Ellipsis

Fragmentary utterances such as ‘short’ answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A′-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena. The situations in (1)–(3) and Ben’s utterances that close them pose a fundamental challenge for standard linguistic theories of the form-meaning relation. (1) Abby and Ben are at a party. Abby asks Ben about who their mutual friend Beth is bringing as a date by uttering: “Who is Beth bringing?” Ben answers: “Alex.” (2) Abby and Ben are at a party. Abby sees an unfamiliar man with Beth, a mutual friend of theirs, and turns to Ben with a puzzled look on her face. Ben says: “Some guy she met at the park.” (3) Abby and Ben are arguing about the origin of products in a new store on their block, with Ben maintaining that the store carries only German products. To settle their debate, they walk into the store together. Ben picks up a lamp at random, upends it, examines the label (which reads Lampenwelt GmbH, Stuttgart), holds the lamp out towards Abby, and proudly proclaims to her: “From Germany! See, I told you!” In each of the above three situations, a linguistic utterance is preceded by some discourse context, which may (as in (1)) but need not (as in (2) and (3)) include linguistic material. The linguistic utterance in each case has two properties, which, taken together, give us cause for alarm. First, the phonetic signal that each of the above utterances gives rise to corresponds Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 661–738, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.