Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments

Robin Lemke

Synopsis

This book investigates the syntax and usage of fragments (Morgan 1973), apparently subsentential utterances like "A coffee, please!" which fulfill the same communicative function as the corresponding full sentence "I'd like to have a coffee, please!". Even though such utterances are frequently used, they challenge the central role that has been attributed to the notion of sentence in linguistic theory, particularly from a semantic perspective.

The first part of the book is dedicated to the syntactic analysis of fragments, which is investigated with experimental methods. Currently there are several competing theoretical analyses of fragments, which rely almost only on introspective data. The experiments presented in this book constitute a first systematic evaluation of some of their crucial predictions and, taken together, support an in situ ellipsis account of fragments, as has been suggested by Reich (2007).

The second part of the book addresses the questions of why fragments are used at all, and under which circumstances they are preferred over complete sentences. Syntactic accounts impose licensing conditions on fragments, but they do not explain, why fragments are sometimes (dis)preferred provided that their usage is licensed. This book proposes an information-theoretic account of fragments, which predicts that the usage of fragments in constrained by a general tendency to distribute processing effort uniformly across the utterance. With respect to fragments, this leads to two predictions, which are empirically confirmed: Speakers tend towards omitting predictable words and they insert additional redundancy before unpredictable words.

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Author Biography

Robin Lemke, Saarland University

Robin Lemke received his MA in linguistics from Humboldt University and he currently works in SFB 1102 at Saarland University, where he investigates information-theoretic constraints on the usage of ellipses. This book is a revised version of his unpublished PhD thesis. His research is located between psycholinguistics, syntax and pragmatics.

Book cover

Published

July 5, 2021 — Updated on November 9, 2021

Versions

LaTeX source on GitHub

Online ISSN

2750-557X

Print ISSN

2750-5588
Cite as
Lemke, Robin. 2021. Experimental investigations on the syntax and usage of fragments. (Open Germanic Linguistics 1). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5596236

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-331-7

doi

10.5281/zenodo.5596236

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-027-3