Presupposition & VP-Ellipsis

What it is about

VP-ellipsis ("John kicked his dog, and Tom did, too") has a strict reading (Tom kicked John's dog) and a sloppy one (Tom kicked Tom's dog). The paper resolves ellipsis at the level of discourse representation, in an extension of DRT. The elided VP is rebuilt by C-abstraction, and the additive particle "too" contributes a presupposition that must be linked to an antecedent. Van der Sandt's binding-or-accommodation algorithm then decides which reading survives: only readings whose presupposition can be bound without contradiction are kept. The particle is what restricts the ellipsis, not an ad hoc copying rule. The paper gives five readings for "John revised his paper before the teacher did, and Bill did, too", and it argues that the approach needs no separate constraints for multiple parallel elements. There are no experiments.

Ideas

• I1. prag/src/frames.rs plus coref/src/sieve.rs: enumerate the candidate antecedent VPs for an elided clause, and keep a candidate only if the presupposition of the particle ("too", "also", "either") can be linked to an entity already in the world. Return each surviving reading with its link.
• I2. Count-based test: the number of surviving readings for a set of sentences with two parallel elements, and whether it matches the paper's five-reading example. Add a control with no particle, which must give no reading.
• I3. Keep the list of additive and focusing particles in the lexicon as a closed BTreeSet, with the presupposition each contributes, so that the trigger list is explicit and checkable.

For Mova

The chapter is 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (ellipsis) and 36. Discourse relations and coherence. The code is prag/src/frames.rs and coref/src/sieve.rs. Measure: reading counts on a list of written ellipsis sentences with particles, plus the no-particle control; run twice. The paper has no corpus numbers, so all measures are new.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/991250.991344

@inproceedings{bos1994presupposition,
  title = {{Presupposition \& VP-Ellipsis}},
  author = {Bos, Johan},
  booktitle = {COLING 1994 Volume 2: The 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1994},
  doi = {10.3115/991250.991344},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/991250.991344}
}

References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Rainer B~uerle. Ereignisse und Repri~sentationen. Technical Report LILOG-REPORT 43, IBM Deutschland GmbIt, 1988. find
2. Mary Dalrymple, Stuart M. Shieber, and Fernando C.N. Pereira. Ellipsis and Higher-Order Unification. Linguistics and Philosophy, 14:399-452, 1991. find
3. Claire Gardent. A unification-based approach to multiple VP Ellipsis resolution. In ACL Proceedings. Sixth European Conference, 1993. find
4. Mark Gawron and Stanley Peters. Anaphora and Quantification in Situation Semantics. CSLI/University of Chicago Press, Stanford, 1990. find
5. Barbara J. Grosz and L. Sidner, Candace. Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12:175-204, 1986. find
6. Irene Heim. On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions. In Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on l~brmal Linguistics, 1983. find
7. Hans Kamp. A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation. Formal Methods in the Study of Language, 1, 1981. find
8. Andrew Kehler. A Discourse Copying Algorithm for Ellipsis and Anaphora Resolution. In ACL Proceedings. Sixth European Conference, 1993. find
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10. David Lewis. Scorekeeping in a language game. Semantics from a different Point of View, 1979. find
11. Hub Priist and Remko Scha. A Discourse Perspective on Verb Phrase Anaphora. In l'roceedings of the Seventh Amsterdam Colloquium, 1990. find
12. Craige Roberts. Modal Subordination, Anaphora and Distributivity. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1987. find
13. Mats Rooth. Association with Focus. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1985. find
14. Ivan Sag. Deletion and Logical/~brm. PhD thesis, MIT, 1976. find
15. tIelle Frisak. Sem. A proposal for ellipsis in DRT. Technical Report 2, Reports in Language, Logic, Information. University of Oslo, 1993. find
16. Rob A. Van der Sandt. Presupposition Projection as Anaphora Resolution. Journal of Semantics, 9:333-377, 1992. find
17. Edwin Williams. Discourse and Logical Form. Linguistic Inquiry, 8(1), 1977. find

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