Me too fragments in English and French: a direct interpretation approach

TitreMe too fragments in English and French: a direct interpretation approach
Publication TypeArticle de revue
Année de publication2022
AuthorsAbeillé, Anne, and Kim Jong-Bok
JournalThe Linguistic review
Volume39
Issue3
Start Page495
Pagination495-524
Abstract

Additive fragments, comprising a nominal remnant and an additive adverb (e.g., too, either) are a particular type of stripping. On the basis of new corpus data in English and French, we show that such fragments do not always have a verbal clause as their antecedent, and that when they do, different kinds of mismatch are possible between a verbal equivalent and the actual fragment. This challenges most approaches based on syntactic reconstruction. We also show that their interpretation is more flexible than previously thought, since they can be used for interrogative, exclamatory, or ordering purposes. We distinguish between a contrastive (non-coreferent) use (A: John left. B: Me too.) and an emphatic (coreferent) one (A: John left. B: HIM too!), mostly in exclamations. We propose a direct interpretation analysis that resorts to no syntactic reconstruction of a verbal clause. The proposed analysis, couched upon construction-based HPSG, allows one to capture some common properties with other fragments (short answers and negative stripping) but also specific properties of additive fragments.

DOI10.1515/tlr-2022-2095