Frazier Lyn, Clifton Charles
University of Massachusetts.
Linguist Philos. 2006 Jun;29(3):315-346. doi: 10.1007/s10988-006-0002-3.
VP-ellipsis generally requires a syntactically matching antecedent. However, many documented examples exist where the antecedent is not appropriate. Kehler (2000, 2002) proposed an elegant theory which predicts a syntactic antecedent for an elided VP is required only for a certain discourse coherence relation (resemblance) not for cause-effect relations. Most of the data Kehler used to motivate his theory come from corpus studies and thus do not consist of true minimal pairs. We report five experiments testing predictions of the coherence theory, using standard minimal pair materials. The results raise questions about the empirical basis for coherence theory because parallelism is preferred for all coherence relations, not just resemblance relations. Further, strict identity readings, which should not be available when a syntactic antecedent is required, are influenced by parallelism per se, holding the discourse coherence relation constant. This draws into question the causal role of coherence relations in processing VP ellipsis.
动词短语省略通常需要一个句法上匹配的先行词。然而，存在许多已记录的例子，其中先行词并不合适。凯勒（2000年、2002年）提出了一个精妙的理论，该理论预测，只有对于特定的语篇连贯关系（相似性），省略的动词短语才需要句法先行词，而因果关系则不需要。凯勒用以支持其理论的大多数数据来自语料库研究，因此并不包含真正的最小对立体。我们报告了五个实验，使用标准的最小对立体材料来检验连贯理论的预测。结果对连贯理论的实证基础提出了质疑，因为对于所有连贯关系，而非仅仅是相似关系，平行性都更受青睐。此外，当需要句法先行词时本不应出现的严格同一性解读，会受到平行性本身的影响，而语篇连贯关系保持不变。这使得连贯关系在处理动词短语省略中的因果作用受到质疑。
