This dissertation examines the real-time processing and interpretation of Ellipsis. Ellipsis refers to a family of elements that are absent from the input but crucial for the overall interpretation of a sentence. Ellipsis therefore offers a unique opportunity to study the form- meaning correspondence in language comprehension, since the intended meaning is transmitted without recourse to a fully-fledged signal. The studies in this dissertation aimed to determine the meaning that is attributed to silent constituents in auditory sentence comprehension, with an emphasis on Verb-Phrase Ellipsis and Sluicing. Furthermore, the time-course of interpretation computation was examined using a methodology sensitive to online processing (Cross-Modal Priming). Chapter 2 investigated the processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (e.g. : The dog disappeared in the crowded street fair and the child did too). Chapter 3 examined the interpretation of Sluiced sentences (The handyman threw a book to the programmer, but I don't know which book). Chapter 4 presents neuropsychological evidence on the recovery of meaning in Verb-Phrase Ellipsis. Taken together, these studies indicate that ellipsis is interpreted in real time, as the sentence unfolds, by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the antecedent (the intended meaning provided in the early part of the sentence). The parser only reactivates the syntactically-defined antecedent; no more material than necessary is reconstructed at the ellipsis. However, the meaning assigned to the ellipsis may differ from the antecedent: in Sluicing, the parser might assign a partial or temporarily mismatching interpretation to the ellipsis. Additionally, these findings point to a role of parallelism expectations in the timely postulation and resolution of ellipsis. Lastly, the linguistic properties of Ellipsis were exploited to test specific hypotheses on language representation and processing in normal and disordered language. For instance, Chapter 2 aimed to determine whether traces are represented as silent syntactic phrases during processing and Chapter 4 evaluated aphasic patients' ability to process, in real time, a complex but canonically-ordered construction.

Ellipsis refers to an element that is absent from the input but whose meaning can nonetheless be recovered from context. In this cross-modal priming study, we examined the online processing of Sluicing, an ellipsis whose antecedent is an entire clause: The handyman threw a book to the programmer but I don’t know which book the handyman threw to the programmerellipsis. To understand such an elliptical construction, the listener arguably must ‘fill in’ the missing material (“the handyman threw___ to the programmer”) based on that which occurs in the antecedent clause. We aimed to determine the point in time in which reconstruction of the sluiced sentence is attempted and whether such a complex antecedent is re-accessed by the ellipsis. Out of the two antecedent constituents for which we probed, only the Object (programmer) was found active in the elliptical clause, confirming that an antecedent is attributed to the sluice in real time. Possible reasons for the non-observation of the Subject (handyman) are considered. We also suggest that ellipses are detected earlier in coordinated than subordinated sentences.

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca’s and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.e., its verb phrase (VP)), which receives its reference from the fully specified VP in the antecedent clause. VPE constructions are unlike other sentence types that require displacement of an argument NP; these latter constructions (e.g., object-relatives, wh-questions) yield either on-time or delayed antecedent reactivation. Our results demonstrate that Anomics, like unimpaired individuals, evince reactivation of the direct object NP (within the VP) at the elided position. Broca’s patients, on the other hand, do not show reactivation of the antecedent. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the larger ‘grain size’ of the reconstructed material in the ellipsis clause, the properties of the auxiliary that carries tense and agreement features, and the possibility that the cost-free syntactic copy procedure claimed to underlie VPE may be modulated by the functional deficit in Broca’s aphasia.