Ellipsis and Response Systems: A Usage and Experimental-based approach (2/4)

Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung Hee University, invité Labex EFL)
(Negated) Fragment answers as a response

Positive as well as negative fragment answers to wh-questions consist of a non-sentential XP but convey the same propositional content as fully sentential answers (e.g., A: What do they want? B: Money. A: What was his motive? B: Not money.) Fragment answers thus also display incongruous mappings from what appear to be syntactically less than sentential structures to the semantically propositional character (Merchant 2005, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005, Ginzburg & Sag 2000). This lecture evaluates the prevalent minimalist perspective that postulates full-sentential source sentences for positive as well as negative fragment answers in natural languages. The lecture shows that when taking into consideration a wider range of empirical data as well as the results of grammatical judgement experiments, positing putative sentential sources run into many potential problems. The lecture, supporting a direct compositionality approach for positive and negative fragment answers, argues that the complete syntax of fragment is just the categorial phrase projection of the fragment itself.