Proformen und Ellipsen : Zur Syntax und Diskurspragmatik prädikativer Anaphern im Deutschen und im Schwedischen
Author
Summary, in English
As a first step, it investigates the core syntactic and, to some extent, the information-structural properties of the predicative proform and ellipsis constructions in German and Swedish. Using anaphora and ellipsis accounts proposed for the English VP ellipsis and, to some degree, its related overt proform expressions ("do it"/"do so") as the point of departure, it is argued that the German and Swedish counterparts appear in similar verbal surroundings. In addition, parallel to the English deletion anaphora, the remnants of the target sentence (subject and auxiliary) may have various discourse functions. Still, the German and Swedish predicative proform and deletion constructions radically differ from the English VP ellipsis. Drawing on syntactic extraction tests, significant differences emerge with respect to the structural make-up of the anaphoric element. Whilst the English-style VP ellipsis shows evidence for the presence of an internal structure, the Swedish and German predicative anaphors all behave as categories without any segmental representation. Also, the morphosyntactic licensing mechanism, generally assumed to hold for the English VP ellipsis, does not extend to German and Swedish. However, differences emerge also when comparing German and Swedish; in contrast to German, Swedish exhibits a quite productive sentence final predicative null anaphor.
As a second step, the thesis addresses the question of the identity requirement holding between the predicative anaphor and its antecedent (i.e. reference resolution). Throughout, an interpretive approach is adopted in order to account for the various kinds of formal mismatches observed in the naturally occurring data. From a cross-linguistic and cross-constructional perspective, the VP ellipsis in English seems to pattern with the overt and covert anaphors in German and in Swedish. This suggests that the reference resolution mechanism is independent of the issue of whether the predicative anaphor/ellipsis contains syntactic structure or not.
Department/s
Publishing year
2009
Language
German
Publication/Series
Lunder germanistische Forschungen
Volume
70
Document type
Dissertation
Publisher
eddy.se ab
Topic
- Languages and Literature
Keywords
- pseudogapping
- proverb
- proform
- predicative anaphora
- deep/surface anaphora
- auxiliaries in German
- auxiliaries in Swedish
- strict/sloppy reading
- topic drop
- VP ellipsis
Status
Published
Supervisor
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 0348-2146
- ISBN: 978-91-85333-27-1
Defence date
17 October 2009
Defence time
10:15
Defence place
Sal L403, Lingvisthuset, Språk- och litteraturcentrum, Helgonabacken 12, Lund
Opponent
- Katharina Hartmann (fil.dr)