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A reply to Kubota and Levine on gapping

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Abstract

In a series of papers Kubota and Levine give an account of gapping and determiner gapping in terms of hybrid type logical grammar, including anomalous scopal interactions with auxiliaries and negative quantifiers. We make three observations: (i) under the counterpart assumptions that Kubota and Levine make, the existent displacement type logical grammar account of gapping already accounts for the scopal interactions, (ii) Kubota and Levine overgenerate determiner-verb order inconsistencies in determiner gapping conjuncts whereas the immediate adaptation of their proposal to displacement type logical grammar does not do so, and (iii) Kubota and Levine do not capture simplex gapping as a special case of complex gapping, but require distinct lexical entries for the two cases; we show how a generalisation of displacement type logical grammar allows both simplex and discontinuous gapping under a single type assignment.

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Notes

  1. An anonymous referee questions whether gapping is after all a purely combinatoric phenomenon citing split antecedent gapping (i), and non-ATB gapping (ii):

    1. (i)

      Sue goes running six times a week, and Alex lifts weights three times a week, but neither every day.

    2. (ii)

      Either Pat came with Chris and Sandy came with Kim, or Pat with Kim and the others were alone.

    We cannot enter fully into this question here except to note that such examples do not show that there is no combinatoric component to gapping, but rather that it is a more generalised phenomenon in the case of iterated coordination, which we do not address here.

  2. We make some notational adjustments in order to smoothen comparison of hybrid TLG and displacement TLG.

  3. Throughout, VP abbreviates N∖S. We limit attention to gapping of the transitive verb category; so far as we are aware gapping in other categories raises no new issues differentiating between hybrid TLG and displacement TLG.

  4. The notation \(\pi_{1}\) (and \(\pi_{2}\)) represents first (and second) projection of an ordered pair, so that e.g. \(\pi_{1}(\phi, \psi) = \phi\).

  5. For example, if T(N)=e where e is the semantic type for individuals, and T(S)=t where t is the semantic type corresponding to truth-values, we have then that T(N∖S)=e→t.

  6. Except we omit the elimination rules for product units which, as well as being unmotivated linguistically, are awkward to formulate in the format used here.

References

  • Hendriks, Petra. 1995. Comparatives and categorial grammar, PhD thesis, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen.

  • Kubota, Yusuke, and Robert Levine. 2012. Gapping as like-category coordination. In Logical aspects of computational linguistics, eds. Denis Bechet and Alexander Dikovsky. Vol. 7351 of Lecture notes in computer science, 135–150. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.

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  • Kubota, Yusuke, and Robert Levine. 2013. Determiner gapping as higher-order discontinuous constituency. In Formal grammar 2012 and 2013, eds. Glyn Morrill and Mark-Jan Nederhof. Vol. 8036 of Springer LNCS, FoLLI publications in logic, language and information, 225–241. Berlin: Springer.

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  • Kubota, Yusuke, and Robert Levine. 2016. Gapping as hypothetical reasoning. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34(1): 107–156.

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  • Morrill, Glyn, Oriol Valentín, and Mario Fadda. 2011. The displacement calculus. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 20(1): 1–48. doi:10.1007/s10849-010-9129-2.

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  • Steedman, Mark. 1990. Gapping as constituent coordination. Linguistics and Philosophy 13(2): 207–263.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially financed by an ICREA Acadèmia to Morrill, MINECO project APCOM (TIN2014-57226-P), and Generalitat de Catalunya project SGR2014-890 (MACDA). We thank two anonymous NLLT referees for comments and suggestions, and Louise McNally for editorial guidance. All errors are our own.

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  1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Glyn Morrill & Oriol Valentín

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  1. Glyn Morrill
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  2. Oriol Valentín
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Correspondence to Glyn Morrill.

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Morrill, G., Valentín, O. A reply to Kubota and Levine on gapping. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 35, 257–270 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-016-9336-x

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