Vrije Competitie Grant for Lisa Cheng and Anikó Liptak
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded LUCL researchers prof.dr. Lisa Cheng and dr. Anikó Liptak a Vrije Competitie grant for their research project "Ellipsis licensing beyond syntax".
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded LUCL researchers prof.dr. Lisa Cheng and dr. Anikó Liptak a Vrije Competitie grant for their research project "Ellipsis licensing beyond syntax".
Ellipsis is a frequently used sentence-shortening device. It allows us to leave out material that is evident from the (linguistic) context. Even though the elliptical material is not pronounced, elliptical sentences are not perceived as incomplete.
The fact that ellipsis cannot just occur anywhere is related to the idea of
licensing: ellipsis is only possible in certain configurations in which it is licensed by particular syntactic material. The syntactic theory of licensing however has great limitations and cannot predict the intra- and inter-language differences that are found. This lacuna results from the concentration of work in the syntactic component, even though it is well-known that ellipsis is a phenomenon that concerns all modules interfacing with the syntactic component.
The project proposes an integrated and comparative study on the syntactic, morphological and prosodic aspects of ellipsis to arrive at an integrated theory of ellipsis licensing.