UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation is about ellipsis, a natural language construction in which a word or phrase is understood even though it is not pronounced. This project brings together two strands of research: formal theoretical research on the relationship between the interpretation of an ellipsis site and its surrounding linguistic context, and psycholinguistics research on the processes by which we build comprehensive meaning from the silence of an ellipsis input. I argue that only by considering these two research programs together can we fully understand ellipsis as a natural language phenomenon. I first present novel English sluicing data that challenge even the most successful existing theories of the relationship between antecedent and elided content in ellipsis constructions by showing that the elided content and antecedent content in a sluicing construction can mismatch to a greater degree than previously thought possible. I use this data to argue that an interpretation condition for ellipsis must be sensitive to pragmatic content, and motivate a proposal in which sluicing is treated as a pragmatics-sensitive phenomenon licensed by local contextual entailment. I then present the results of eight experiments on ellipsis comprehension that use offline comprehension measures and online measures of incremental processing. I show that anaphoric and cataphoric ellipsis comprehension is subject to a proximity bias, wherein comprehenders prefer to resolve an ellipsis site to the candidate antecedent in greatest proximity to the ellipsis site, regardless of whether the site precedes or follows the antecedent. I also show that cataphoric ellipsis comprehension is subject to an active, forward search strategy. I argue that ellipsis processing ultimately shares features both with anaphoric processing and with the processing of long-distance dependencies, such as filler-gap processes.