In this chapter, I establish to what extent we find ellipsis in discourse fragments such as answers to yes-no questions in EP adult grammar. I argue that some types of answers to yes-no questions in EP are cases of ellipsis and others are cases of deep anaphora in the sense of Hankamer and Sag (1976). e cases of ellipsis, more precisely VPE, are central in this dissertation. I therefore start by presenting some novel evidence in support of Matos' (1992) claim that EP has V-stranding VPE, which is a type of VPE that exists in Hebrew and Irish (Doron, 1999; McCloskey, 1991; Goldberg, 2005). Since, in EP, many sentences are ambiguous between VPE and null object or between VPE and null complement anaphora, I establish the difierences between these constructions. e discussion developed at that point sets the background for the discussion of the learnability problem posed by VPE in EP, as presented in Chapter 3. At the end of this chapter, I discuss the licensing and identification conditions on VPE in more detail. e discussion of the identifica-tion conditions on VPE, along the lines of Merchant (2001), asserts the notion of givenness as central to the understanding of ellipsis; it also defines to what extent ellipsis interacts with focus. Again, only in Chapter 3 I define the relevance of this discussion for the study of language acquisition.
In the preceding chapter, I showed that VPE is a complex issue, involving syntactic licensing conditions and discourse/semantic identification conditions. If understood as deletion, along the lines of recent work, it involves the PF interface and therefore the syntax/phonology interface. By its discourse properties, VPE indirectly relates to focus. In this chapter, I present the main questions for acquisition that are raised by what we know about VPE and its interaction with focus, I report the results of preceding research on the acquisition of VPE and focus, and I define the working hypotheses of this dissertation.
In this chapter, I argue that EP offers evidence that children are able to produce VPE very early on in the acquisition process. e evidence comes from verbal answers to yes-no questions, a context of VPE in root clauses which does not involve coordination.
In the previous chapter, I reported that children sometimes fail to give the right affrmative answer when the question has a cleft or the focus marker s only in preverbal position. Children give a verbal answer to these questions instead of the required sim yes or SER be answers. At that point, the discussion was left open as to whether the problem was children's comprehension of the structure of a verbal answer or their comprehension of the question. is chapter presents the results of a small experiment designed to obtain an answer to this particular question.
In this chapter, I present a summary of the main results presented in the preceding chapters. I also point to issues left for future research.
In this chapter, I establish to what extent we find ellipsis in discourse fragments such as answers to yes-no questions in EP adult grammar. I argue that some types of answers to yes-no questions in EP are cases of ellipsis and others are cases of deep anaphora in the sense of Hankamer and Sag (1976). e cases of ellipsis, more precisely VPE, are central in this dissertation. I therefore start by presenting some novel evidence in support of Matos' (1992) claim that EP has V-stranding VPE, which is a type of VPE that exists in Hebrew and Irish (Doron, 1999; McCloskey, 1991; Goldberg, 2005). Since, in EP, many sentences are ambiguous between VPE and null object or between VPE and null complement anaphora, I establish the difierences between these constructions. e discussion developed at that point sets the background for the discussion of the learnability problem posed by VPE in EP, as presented in Chapter 3. At the end of this chapter, I discuss the licensing and identification conditions on VPE in more detail. e discussion of the identifica-tion conditions on VPE, along the lines of Merchant (2001), asserts the notion of givenness as central to the understanding of ellipsis; it also defines to what extent ellipsis interacts with focus. Again, only in Chapter 3 I define the relevance of this discussion for the study of language acquisition.
In the preceding chapter, I showed that VPE is a complex issue, involving syntactic licensing conditions and discourse/semantic identification conditions. If understood as deletion, along the lines of recent work, it involves the PF interface and therefore the syntax/phonology interface. By its discourse properties, VPE indirectly relates to focus. In this chapter, I present the main questions for acquisition that are raised by what we know about VPE and its interaction with focus, I report the results of preceding research on the acquisition of VPE and focus, and I define the working hypotheses of this dissertation.
In this chapter, I argue that EP offers evidence that children are able to produce VPE very early on in the acquisition process. e evidence comes from verbal answers to yes-no questions, a context of VPE in root clauses which does not involve coordination.
In the previous chapter, I reported that children sometimes fail to give the right affrmative answer when the question has a cleft or the focus marker s only in preverbal position. Children give a verbal answer to these questions instead of the required sim yes or SER be answers. At that point, the discussion was left open as to whether the problem was children's comprehension of the structure of a verbal answer or their comprehension of the question. is chapter presents the results of a small experiment designed to obtain an answer to this particular question.
In this chapter, I present a summary of the main results presented in the preceding chapters. I also point to issues left for future research.