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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Summer November 2014 Fragments and Clausal Ellipsis Andrew Weir University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Semantics and Pragmatics Commons, and the Syntax Commons Recommended Citation Weir, Andrew, "Fragments and Clausal Ellipsis" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 260. https://doi.org/10.7275/5823750.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/260 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FRAGMENTS AND CLAUSAL ELLIPSIS A Dissertation Presented by ANDREW WEIR Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2014 Linguistics c Copyright by Andrew Weir 2014 All Rights Reserved FRAGMENTS AND CLAUSAL ELLIPSIS A Dissertation Presented by ANDREW WEIR Approved as to style and content by: Kyle Johnson, Chair Ellen Woolford, Member Jeremy Hartman, Member Luiz Amaral, Member John Kingston, Head of Department Linguistics For Jean Brady, 1919–2014 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As I write this, I’m on a plane flying from Brussels to Charlotte, North Carolina, thence to connect to Bradley International Airport. I’m going to spend a week in Massachusetts, to do a variety of things, one of them being to file this dissertation. I’ve got(ten)1 used to transatlantic flights by now, but my first was just over five years ago, to visit UMass. I didn’t know what an adventure that would end up being. Almost none of it can be satisfactorily summarized in these acknowledgments. That said, the ac- knowledgments are all I’ve read of most people’s dissertations, so I’m aware I should make these good. As is traditional, let’s start with my committee. Kyle Johnson is who I want to be when I grow up. Even during the longest, darkest nights of the soul experienced during the creation of this dissertation, I always knew that meeting with Kyle would drag me out of any depression I was in, partly because he’s such a [expletive deleted] cheery fellow who you can rely upon to laugh at your jokes even when they’re not funny, but mostly because Kyle knows everything about everything (everything linguistic, anyway). I think in literally every meeting we had, Kyle worked out the solution to some problem I was having, letting me claim the resulting answer as my own. In particular, his protestations that he is an amateur in semantics are clearly lies, which is one reason why a nominally syntactic dissertation has ended up with so much semantics in it. I didn’t really ever ‘propose’ to Kyle to ask him to be my advisor; as I hear often happens, he just sort of assumed the role of chair, in paternal fashion. I am extremely grateful he did. 1My Scottish friends are fond of noting that, while my accent has remained more-or-less the same, my sojourn in the US has sometimes had effects on my word choice, inflectional morphology, and stress place- ment. v Ellen Woolford has been my guide in all things syntax/PF-y since the seminar I took from her on the topic. Meetings with her always resulted in clearer, more persuasive, more focused arguments in the dissertation, and on the great number of occasions when I was about to say something that, from a syntactic, morphological, or cross-linguistic perspective, was just silly, she steered me clear of those pitfalls. I’m particularly grateful to her for putting me on to the literature about logophoric contexts, which helped me talk about ‘verbs of speech or thought’ in chapter 5 in a sensible way. She’s also great fun to meet with; like Kyle, I don’t think I ever walked out of her office without a smile on my face. The impact Jeremy Hartman has had on this dissertation should be clear from the num- ber of times the phrase “the below example (from Jeremy Hartman, p.c.)” appears in it. Jeremy’s generosity in bequeathing these examples to me – linguists are often very posses- sive of cool data! – led to this dissertation containing many of the interesting puzzles that it does. (Whether I’ve solved the puzzles or not is up to the reader.) In particular, the example Which Bronte¨ sister wrote Emma? – #Jane Austen started me on a long but fascinating and productive journey (of which much of chapter 3 is the result). But it’s not just data Jeremy provided: he also provided many of the probing and challenging questions that encouraged me to make my analysis sharper and clearer. We also had a great time in meetings trying to attack these problems, and once again, I don’t think I ever had a frustrating or depressing meeting with him, one of the highest compliments I can pay an advisor. (What a lucky doctoral student I have been in the committee I chose!) While Luiz Amaral and I did not have the chance to meet regularly to discuss this dissertation, I’m very grateful to him for agreeing to be my outside member, and providing some very helpful feedback and comments at the defense. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all the other teachers I have had at UMass, in classes and seminars, advising generals papers, and in some cases just giving generously of their time when nothing compelled them to: Rajesh Bhatt, Seth Cable, Ilaria Frana, Lyn Frazier, vi Lisa Green, Alice Harris, Angelika Kratzer, John McCarthy, Barbara Partee, Joe Pater, Tom Roeper, Lisa Selkirk, and Peggy Speas. I’m grateful to the various language consultants whose judgments are used throughout this dissertation (following the normal armchair linguist’s method of finding them in the office or sending them an email and saying ‘Hey, can you say this in your language?’): Magda Oiry and J´er´emy Pasquereau (French), Jon Ander Mendia (Spanish), Stefan Keine (German), Sakshi Bhatia and Jyoti Iyer (Hindi), Yelena Fainleib and Aleksei Nazarov (Rus- sian), Anik´oLipt´ak (Hungarian), Hannah Greene (Embedded T-to-C Question English), and more or less everyone in the department (Standard English). Parts of the material in this dissertation (prior versions of chapter 3) were presented at the Identity in Ellipsis workshop, held at Leiden University in September 2013, and at NELS 44 at the University of Connecticut in October 2013. I’m grateful to the audiences there for comments. In particular I am grateful to Jason Merchant for his comments both in Leiden and during his visit to UMass in April 2014. I also thank Pauline Jacobson for sharing her work (Jacobson 2013) with me. Liliane Haegeman has been a source of constant encouragement to me over the past five years – even after I ran away to the US. I’m extremely grateful to her for hiring me in the position I currently have at Ghent University; I can’t imagine a better place to be moving to from UMass. From my past, I would like to also thank the teachers (and writers of letters of rec- ommendation!) that helped me get to this point: at Edinburgh, my dissertation advisors Caroline Heycock and Peter Ackema; at UCL, Klaus Abels, Ad Neeleman, and Hans van de Koot. That’s the academic side of the acknowledgments over (well, not really; almost all of the people I’m about to thank offered academic or linguistic advice too at one time or another, but they weren’t getting paid for it). Now to the fun stuff. Almost all of my cohort stayed in 311 South College for the entire time I was at UMass. (Now that the Linguistics vii department is moving to pastures new, we were in fact its last inhabitants.) They were a great part of the reason why my time at UMass was as enjoyable as it was. Thanks, for insights about linguistics and life, to Minta Elsman, Claire Moore-Cantwell, Presley Pizzo, Jason Overfelt, and Robert Staubs.2 Special thanks are due to Robert, Claire and Minta, my fellow erstwhile residents of 40 Grant, for taking me (a clueless immigr´efrom Scotland) under their wing and giving me a roof over my head. And thanks to the others in the Pioneer Valley, UMass linguists and others, who I enjoyed a beer or two with on occasion: Mike Clauss, Hannah Greene, Matt Hine, Nick LaCara, Jon Ander Mendia, Ali Neyers, Yangsook Park, J´er´emy Pasquereau, Amanda Rysling, Anisa Schardl, Brian Smith, and Megan Somerday. Chunks of this dissertation materialized while I was at home in Scotland, and the people that were instrumental in keeping me sane during that process are: Jim, my comrade-in- arms (and Sonic 3) for over twenty years; the residents of THE FLAT, Keshav, Scott and Graeme; Steven and Kirsty, Jamie and Debbie, Craig, Lesley, Lynsey, Katie, Jane, Kev, Smill, Graeme and Emma; the Edinburgh lunch-and-linguistics partners in crime, Aya and Numi; and the Red Chumpos and their fellow travelers, comrades Yiannis, Euan, Phil and Neil. Cheers, everybody. The next pint in the Fish (or Duke’s Corner, or the Pear Tree, or wherever) is on me. There are not enough words that I can put in these acknowledgments to thank Sandra and Bryce, my mother and father, for the love, support and trust they have shown in my twenty-eight years.
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