Linguists traditionally have assumed that full sentence sources truncated by ellipsis rules account for the grammatical structure as well as the semantic interpretation of fragments like B below: A: What happened in 1974? B: A scandal in the White House. A sentential structure dominated by the initial node of S is reduced to a fragment by the operation of ellipsis, and it is the full sentential source that provides the semantic interpretation for the remaining fragment.Barton argues against both of these assumptions. She claims that independent major lexical categories like the example above are generated within a grammar as syntactic structures dominated by the initial node of NP, VP, and so on, rather than S. Her second claim is that the major part of the interpretation of these independent constituent utterances takes place within a pragmatic context, rather than in the semantic component of a grammar. A theory of nonsentential constituents is presented consisting of two interacting models: an autonomous competence model of the grammar of nonsentential constituent structures, and a modular pragmatic model of the interpretation of independent constituent utterances in context.
Interacting Models in a Theory of Nonsententiel Constituents
Motivating a Nonsentential Constituent Structure Analysis
A Competence Model of the Grammar of Nonsentantial Constituent Structures
The Representation of Linguistic Context in the Pragmatic Model
The Representation of Conversational Context in the Pragmatic Model
Conclusion
Notes
Index of Topics
Index of Names
Cited by (64)
Cited by 64 other publications
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2025. On the interpretation of English negative quantifiers as fragment answers to negative wh-questions in the absence of a biasing context: an experimental investigation. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 28:1
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Lemke, Robin, Lisa Schäfer, Ingo Reich & Andriy Myachykov
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Mankowitz, Poppy
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Jaszczolt, Kasia M., Eleni Savva & Michael Haugh
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Kaltenböck, Gunther, Evelien Keizer & Arne Lohmann
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Progovac, Ljiljana
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Temmerman, Tanja
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Barton, Ellen & Ljiljana Progovac
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Stanley, Jason
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Stainton, Robert J.
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Stainton, Robert J.
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[no author supplied]
2002. References. In Thoughts and Utterances, ► pp. 384 ff.
[no author supplied]
2006. Bibliography. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ► pp. 742 ff.
[no author supplied]
2006. Copyright Page. In Words and Thoughts, ► pp. iv ff.
[no author supplied]
2006. Detailed Contents. In Words and Thoughts, ► pp. x ff.
[no author supplied]
2006. Dedication. In Words and Thoughts, ► pp. v ff.
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