Semantic Ellipsis
This chapter looks at semantic ellipsis: expressions that are not syntactically sentential, but nevertheless have characters that yield propositional contents given a context. Relevant examples include ‘Attention!’ and ‘No shirt, no shoes, no service’. The idea is to use such cases to explain away apparently sub-sentential speech: an attempt is made to assimilate the cases under discussion (like ‘Nice dress’ and ‘On the stoop’) to commands such as ‘Attention!’. This attempted assimilation is rejected on two fronts. First, it would require that human languages contain masses of semantically elliptical sentences. Second, postulating these masses of elliptical sentences would introduce lots of new ambiguities — which would be otiose, since a language that lacked such ambiguities would be used in just the ways we actually observe.
Keywords: expressions, sub-sentential speech, assimilation, elliptical sentence, semantics
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .