Elided indexicals
David Blunier
April 2022
 

Indexical expressions raise interesting issues when involved in ellipsis phenomena, some of which having to do with their unexpected interpretations in `participant-switching' configurations (Sag and Hankamer 1984, Bevington 1998, Chung 2000, Charnavel 2019, Balachandran 2021). I develop here an account of indexicals in VP-ellipsis sentences that crucially relies on conceiving ellipsis as a form of discourse anaphora and, as such, highly sensitive to pragmatic factors such as topicality and the question under discussion (Roberts, 2012), contrasting with approaches trying to define ellipsis through syntactic and/or semantic identity with a linguistic antecedent. The proposal has a number of welcome consequences, allowing us to derive the problematic data while preserving Kaplan's 1989 original insights about indexicality.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006310
(please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords: indexicals, ellipsis, pronouns, question under discussion, qud, strict, sloppy, pragmatics, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v2 [April 2022]
v1 [November 2021]
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