Experimental and Corpus-based Approaches to Ellipsis

Saturday 13 July 2019, 09:00 to 18:00
Organisation: 
Joanna Nykiel (Kyung Hee U.), Philip Miller (U. Paris Diderot) & Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung Hee U.)
Lieu: 

UC Davis Conference Center,
Ballroom A

Keynote Speakers: Anne Abeille (U. Paris-Diderot) and Pranav Anand (UC Santa Cruz)

Presentation: Ellipsis is a central phenomenon at the interface between syntax, semantics, phonology and discourse. It has been, and continues to be, the focus of numerous publications. Specifically, a major handbook on the subject has recently been published (van Craenenbroeck & Temmerman 2018). Despite a huge amount of theoretical work (from, e.g., Hankamer & Sag 1976 to current work by Johnson 2001, Merchant 2001, van Craenenbroek 2010) and a long tradition in psycholinguistic experimentation (from Murphy 1985 and Tannnenhaus & Carlson 1990 to current work by Frazier 2013, Kertz 2013, Kim & Runner 2017), major questions remain open, most centrally the question of whether it is necessary to hypothesize the existence of unpronounced syntactic structure at the ellipsis site. The purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers who have been working on elliptical phenomena with special emphasis on methodologies aiming to improve the empirical foundations of the discussion, specifically psycholinguistic experimentation (acceptability and eye-tracking experiments, in particular) and corpus investigations. Contributions will be welcome concerning (i) the specific experimental methodologies being used in psycholinguistics, and how they can be improved to give more reliable and interpretable results; (ii) the way corpus data can be brought to bear on theoretical questions; and (iii) how corpus data can be used to improve the results of psycholinguistic experiments, specifically by increasing the naturalness of the materials by providing new hypotheses. This one-day conference will be held in connection with the 2019 LSA Linguistic Institute and continues the theme initiated by its predecessor during the previous LSA Linguistic Institute.