Annual Meeting Handbook - Linguistic Society of America

Thursday, 8 January
Plenary Address
Grand Ballroom
8:30 - 9:30 PM
The syntax-discourse interface:
Lyn Frazier
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Processing ellipsis
How do perceivers parse and interpret elided constituents (silence) There is a long standing debate in the linguistic literature about
whether syntactic 'reconstruction' is required for an elided constituent (e.g. the elided VP in Max laughed. Tina did [ ] too.) or whether a
purely semantic or discourse account will suffice. We present several experimental studies of VP ellipsis and sluicing which were
designed to investigate the interplay of syntax and discourse in processing ellipsis.
We use the results of the studies to argue that the syntactic and discourse systems differ not only in terms of their vocabulary, the
kinds of structures implicated, and their characteristic domains but also in terms of their salience properties: Recently encountered
material, material low in the syntactic tree, is most salient in the syntax whereas material that is part of the 'main assertion', typically
material high in the syntactic tree, is most salient in the discourse representation. We also argue that spelling out the interplay of the
syntactic and discourse systems in processing ellipsis may help us to understand certain contrasts when sluicing may violate island
constraints and when it may not.
Overall the results favor syntactic approaches to ellipsis. However, it is well-known that syntactic accounts of ellipsis undergenerate:
They permit ellipsis only in circumstances where a syntactically parallel antecedent is available. But clearly ellipsis sometimes takes
place when no syntactically-appropriate antecedent is available. Recent 'mixed' or hybrid accounts of ellipsis claim that the type of
antecedent that is required, syntactic or only semantic, depends on the type of discourse coherence relation at issue. Preliminary
evidence suggests that these accounts are also inadequate and that the best approach to the undergeneration problem may involve
alterations of the antecedent at LF.
Lyn Frazier (PhD, U CT, 1978) is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at U-MA-Amherst. She is interested in how the
grammar is mentally represented and used in adult language comprehension. With her long-term collaborators, C. Clifton and K.
Rayner of the Department of Psychology, she has developed and tested experimentally various theories of syntactic processing. She
has co-edited Language acquisition and language processing (with De Villiers) and Perspectives on sentence processing (with Clifton &
Rayner); co-authored a book on processing adjuncts, Construal, (with Clifton); and published a monograph on semantic processing,
On sentence interpretation. She is co-editor of the Kluwer series Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics. Her current research
examines the interface of syntax with prosody, funded by an NSF grant (with Clifton), and the interface of syntax and discourse, funded
by an NIH grant on ellipsis (with Clifton). She also holds a grant on eye-movements during reading (with Rayner).
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