Questions: Ellipsis and Covert Structure

Question 1

In 'Mary thinks she's brilliant, and I do too,' what does the sloppy reading mean, and why does it matter theoretically?

• A. I also think that Mary is brilliant — the elided VP copies the exact meaning of the antecedent
• B. I think that I am brilliant — the syntactic structure is reused but the pronoun re-binds to a new referent, producing a different truth condition
• C. The sentence is ambiguous in a way that only context can resolve pragmatically, with no grammatical explanation
• D. The sentence is ungrammatical because the pronoun cannot bind across the ellipsis site

Answer: (B)

The sloppy reading (I think I'm brilliant) arises because the grammar reuses the VP structure with variable binding rather than copying the exact semantic content. The pronoun 'she' in the antecedent is interpreted relative to its binder (Mary) — in the elided copy, the parallel pronoun re-binds to the new subject (I). This proves that ellipsis recovery computes grammatical structure with binding, not just meaning-copying. A purely pragmatic account predicting free meaning inference could not explain why both readings are available and grammatically distinct.

Question 2

What is the strongest evidence that ellipsis resolution is governed by grammatical constraints rather than unconstrained pragmatic inference?

• A. Elliptical sentences are processed faster than full sentences, suggesting they are grammatically simpler
• B. Ellipsis is cross-linguistically common, appearing in languages with very different grammars
• C. Interpretations that are pragmatically reasonable and contextually supported are systematically blocked when they fail to satisfy structural identity or semantic licensing conditions
• D. The antecedent for elided material must always appear in the immediately preceding sentence

Answer: (C)

If ellipsis were purely pragmatic, any contextually supported interpretation should be recoverable. But grammar blocks many pragmatically reasonable interpretations: the elided VP must match the antecedent in specific structural ways; the antecedent must be of the right syntactic type; certain mismatches (e.g., active/passive) are systematically blocked or produce strict/sloppy contrasts. These patterns follow from grammatical architecture, not conversational inference. Speed of processing and cross-linguistic frequency don't bear directly on this question.

Question 3

In VP ellipsis, the elided material is grammatically present as covert structure — it has syntactic representation even though it is not phonologically realized.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

True. Linguists posit that the elided VP is present in the syntactic structure at an abstract level (sometimes called LF, logical form) even though it has no phonological realization. This covert structure is what enables variable binding (the sloppy reading) and what must satisfy the identity conditions for licensing. If the VP were simply absent with no structural trace, there would be no way to explain why only certain interpretations are recoverable and why the strict/sloppy distinction falls out from the grammar.

Question 4

Ellipsis resolution is purely pragmatic: listeners infer missing content from world knowledge and conversational context, without any special grammatical machinery.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

False. If ellipsis were purely pragmatic, we would expect much greater flexibility in what interpretations are recoverable — anything that makes contextual sense should be available. Instead, ellipsis obeys strict structural constraints: VP ellipsis requires a VP antecedent; sluicing requires a matching existential in the antecedent; gapping follows locality and parallelism constraints. These restrictions are not explained by conversational principles but by grammatical architecture. Pure pragmatics cannot predict which interpretations are blocked, only which ones are contextually plausible.

Question 5

Why do the strict and sloppy readings of VP ellipsis provide evidence for covert grammatical structure rather than purely pragmatic interpretation?

Model answer: The two readings arise from different ways the grammar processes the elided VP. The strict reading copies semantic content directly (I think Mary is brilliant). The sloppy reading reuses the syntactic structure and re-applies variable binding (I think I am brilliant). A purely pragmatic account would simply recover whichever meaning is most contextually plausible — it has no mechanism to derive two grammatically distinct interpretations from a single syntactic context. The fact that both readings are systematically available and predictable from structural properties of the antecedent (whether the pronoun is bound or free) shows that the grammar is computing interpretations over covert structural representations, not inferring them from context.

The strict/sloppy distinction is a diagnostic for the presence of syntactic variable binding in the ellipsis site. It reveals that the grammar treats the elided VP as a structural object with binding relations intact, not as a semantic shorthand.