Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech

The papers in this volume address two main topics: Q1: What is the nature, and especially the scope, of ellipsis in natural l- guage?

Q2: What are the linguistic/philosophical implications of what one takes the nature/scope of ellipsis to be?

As will emerge below, each of these main topics includes a large sub-part that deals speci?cally with nonsentential speech.

Within the ?rst main topic, Q1, there arises the sub-issueofwhethernonsententialspeechfallswithinthescopeofellipsisornot;within the second main topic, Q2, there arises the sub-issue of what linguistic/philosophical implications follow, if nonsentential speech does/does not count as ellipsis.

I. THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF ELLIPSIS A. General Issue: How Many Natural Kinds? There are many things to which the label 'ellipsis' can be readily applied.

But it's quite unclear whether all of them belong in a single natural kind.

To explain, consider a view, assumed in Stainton (2000), Stainton (2004a), and elsewhere.

It is the view that there are fundamentally (at least) three very different things that readily get called 'ellipsis', each belonging to a distinct kind.

First, there is the very broad phenomenon of a speaker omitting information which the hearer is expected to make use of in interpreting an utterance.

Included therein, possibly as a special case, is the use of an abbreviated form of speech, when one could have used a more explicit expression. (See Neale (2000) and Sellars (1954) for more on this idea.