A Comparative Study of VP Ellipsis in Japanese and English

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 22520513
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Kyoto Sangyo University
• Principal Investigator: TAKAHASHI Mari 京都産業大学, 外国語学部, 教授 (20247779)
• Project Period (FY): 2010-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 日本語 / 英語 / 省略 / 動詞句 / 文脈照応

Outline of Final Research Achievements

VP ellipsis is an extreme form of phonological reduction signaling the presence of a discourse anaphor. It is brought about by the phonological deletion of a VP which contains all the lexical materials to be interpreted, derived in the same way as non-deleted VPs. In order for VP ellipsis to be licensed, the deleted VP must be contained in a constituent α which has an antecedent β with an identical interpretation except for the contribution of a contrastive-focused constituent within α. This study shows, based on experiments using constructions containing VPs headed by a free verb as test sentences, that Japanese has the same phenomenon as the English VP ellipsis, licensed under the same conditions. It also shows that Japanese VP-elided phrases receive different types of interpretations from VPs containing a null object, indicating that the two constructions have different structures.

Free Research Field

言語学、文法理論、統語理論、形態音韻論、意味論