An Event-based Approach to Fragments as TP Ellipsis

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Based on dichotomy of elaborative fragment and contrastive fragment proposed by Griffiths & Liptak(2014), i.e., that the former is island insensitive and the latter repairs island, this study attempts to provide a supplementary semantic
and discourse oriented analysis for fragmentary expressions by extending a discourse semantic account on sluicing proposed in Wee(2015), which argues that the elided event of sluicing is anaphorically bound to the antecedent event. This study argues that fragmentary expressions, which are also instances of TP ellipsis, should be explainable in the same way as sluicing, by showing that TP ellipsis is possible if the same event as the elided event is available in the prior discourse, either as an entailment or a presupposition of the immediate antecedent. By scrutinizing the discourse context where the antecedent occurs as well as the fragment, and based on the observation that even a fragment answer which should be judged grammatically as the worst can constitute a possible kind of conversation in Korean with a proper intonation pattern, i.e., with the unfocused part deaccentuated, as an indicator for existential
presupposition for TP ellipsis, it is claimed that island violation may be repaired not only by ellipsis but also by deaccenting, considering that island constraint is a PF-theory as claimed by Merchant (2004).