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Article published In:
Register Variation and Syntactic Theory
Edited by Diane Massam and Tim Stowell
[Linguistic Variation 17:2] 2017
► pp. 186–204

On the omission of articles and copulae in German newspaper headlines

| Universität des Saarlandes
This paper argues based on a corpus-linguistic study that both omitted articles and copulae in German headlines are to be treated as null elements NA and NC. Both items need to be licensed by a specific (parsing) strategy known as discourse orientation (Huang, 1984), which is also applicable in the special register of headlines. It is shown that distinguishing between discourse and sentence orientation and correlating these two strategies with λ-binding and existential quantification, respectively, naturally accounts for an asymmetry in article omission observed in Stowell (1991).
Keywords: syntax, formal semantics, formal pragmatics, register variation, headlines, ellipsis, article omission, copula omission, discourse orientation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Copula omission in German headlines
    • 2.1A “small clause” analysis of fragments in German?
    • 2.2XP-YP-sequences as predicational structures
    • 2.3Discourse orientation and sentence orientation
  • 3.Article omission in German headlines
    • 3.1Null article or determiner deletion?
    • 3.2Deriving ‘Stowell’s Law’
      • Part 1Deriving positive results
      • Part 2Deriving negative results
      • Intermediate summary
      • Part 3Generalizing to n > 2
  • 4.Interaction between article and copula omission
  • 5.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14017.rei
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2018. Ellipsen. In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 240 ff. DOI logo

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