※ 國立清華大學語言所新第020次專題演講※
講者：Yuyun Iris Wang (Ming Chuan University)
題目：The complexity of the invisible NP
日期：2016年10月19日 (星期三)
時間：中午12時30分 開始
地點：人社院 B305 教室
摘要：This talk focuses on two issues: the nature of English one and two types of NP-ellipses. First, I argue that English one should not be treated as a pro-form in NP-ellipsis (cf. Ross 1967, Jackendoff 1977). Instead, following Alexiadou & Gengel (2012) and Kayne (2015), English one should be analyzed as a kind of classifier which brings about the interpretation of partitivity and licenses the invisible NP in NP-ellipsis. To be more specific, since the adjective and some of the determiners in English cannot take partitive form by themselves, one-insertion is therefore obligatory in the English NP-ellipsis construction. Second, two types of NP-ellipsis should be distinguished according to their corresponding licensors: partitive and attributive. I propose that cross-linguistically, the licensors of the invisible noun in NP-ellipsis must be morphologically overt, including the classifier/determiner, the attributive marker, and the agreement marker. This account is supported by the patterns observed in the NP-ellipsis sentences in Chinese, in which the invisible nouns are licensed either by the classifier or by the modificational marker de. The overt morphological cues thus license the invisible NPs.