Parenthesis and Ellipsis

Cross-linguistic and Theoretical Perspectives

Workshop (AG4), 34th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Linguistics

Dates March 12-15, 2013 (see below for detailed program)
Location University of Potsdam, Campus Griebnitzsee, building 6, room S16 (campus map)
Contact incompleteparenthesis@gmail.com

Workshop Description

This AG intends to bring together scholarship on parenthesis and incompleteness phenomena (ellipsis), and especially the interplay between the two. In addition to 'regular' types of ellipsis (sluicing, VP ellipsis) in parenthetical contexts, various types of parentheses have been argued to be inherently incomplete and/or contain an empty operator: the missing object in comment clauses (Schneider 2007), the implied subject plus copula in appositions (Heringa 2011), covert clausal structure in identificational afterthoughts (Ott & De Vries 2012), etc.

We are interested in empirical differences and similarities between (unrelated) languages in this domain, as well as theoretical approaches to incomplete parenthesis. Since incompleteness is often contingent on information-structural properties, and since parentheses appear to be in a different informational dimension than the 'at issue' content of an utterance (Potts 2005), one expects the intersection of these two domains to reveal interesting facts and generalizations (for instance, concerning the cross-linguistically variable expression of focus). Thus, we can ask questions like the following:

We welcome submissions on these and related questions from all subfields of linguistics, including syntax, semantics, discourse theory, prosody, and typology.

Invited speakers

Stefan Schneider (U Graz)
Luis Vicente (U Potsdam)

Workshop program

Program in PDF format (subject to change)

Wednesday, March 13

14:00-14:30 Marlies Kluck, Dennis Ott & Mark de Vries Introduction
14:30-15:00 Sandra Döring Parentheticals are - presumably - CPs
15:00-15:30 Julia Bacskai-Atkari Parenthesis and comparative operator deletion
15:30-16:00 Natalia Korotkova How do you think? Apparent wh-scope marking in Russian
- break -
16:30-17:00 Matthew Barros & Jeroen van Craenenbroeck Tag questions and 'pseudo'-ellipsis
17:00-17:30 Bradley Larson The inherent syntactic incompleteness of Right Node Raising
17:30-18:00 Tracy Conner Overt functional heads license ellipsis: a unified account of VP-ellipsis and ellipsis in possessive DPs
18:00-18:30 Yiqin Qiu The negation in VP-ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese

Thursday, March 14

09:00-10:00 Stefan Schneider (invited speaker) Remarks on parenthesis and incompleteness phenomena in the Romance languages
10:00-10:30 Werner Frey & Hubert Truckenbrodt On the prosody and interpretation of some non-integrated constituents
10:30-11:00 Güliz Günes Limits on the syntax-prosody mapping: finite and non-finite clausal parentheticals in Turkish
- break -
11:30-12:00 Gunther Kaltenböck & Bernd Heine On theticals: a 'rootless analysis' of I think
12:00-12:30 James Griffiths Amalgamation in mitigator constructions
12:30-13:00 Frederic Gachet Syntactic analysis of que-deletion in French

Friday, March 15

11:30-12:00 Nicholas LaCara Inversion, deletion, and focus in as-parentheticals
12:00-12:30 Ivan Sag, James Collins, Daria Popova & Thomas Wasow Sluicing and salience
12:30-13:00 Gabriela Bilbiie Verbless relative adjuncts as incidental fragments
13:00-14:00 Luis Vicente (invited speaker) A structural paradox with respect to parentheticals inside coordinate structures

Information for presenters

The DGfS meeting will take place March 12-15, 2013 at the University of Potsdam. An English-language website containing general information concerning the conference, accomodation, etc. is available.

Our workshop (AG 4) will take place March 12-15 at the University of Potsdam, Campus Griebnitzsee, building 6, room S16.

For information about other theme sessions, plenary talks, etc. refer to the official program.


Workshop organizers

Marlies Kluck (U Groningen)
Dennis Ott (U Groningen)
Mark de Vries (U Groningen)