A unified approach to VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora

Abstract

It is known that VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora are typologically different phenomena. English has VP-ellipses whereas Korean has VP-anaphora. The goals of this paper are (i) to develop a unified algorithm which can analyze these two different phenomena and (ii) to explain them using the developed resolution algorithm. In order to analyze these phenomena, this paper incorporates Jager's anaphora resolution mechanism (2010) into the typed feature structure formalism of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). In this paper, VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora are analyzed as follows. First, English do and Korean kuleha-ta are introduced with the Geach value, and this value is changed with a slash-elimination rule. Then, one constituent combines with another by ordinary syntactic rules, while the information on the target predicate is percolated up. When a potential source appears, a slash-introduction rule is applied. Then, the source predicate activates the VP-resolution rule, and the target predicate is connected with the source in the semantic representations.