Me too fragments in English and French: a direct interpretation approach

Anne Abeillé; Jong-Bok Kim

doi:10.1515/tlr-2022-2095

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Me too fragments in English and French: a direct interpretation approach

Anne Abeillé and Jong-Bok Kim

Published/Copyright: July 20, 2022

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From the journal The Linguistic Review Volume 39 Issue 3

Abstract

Additive fragments, comprising a nominal remnant and an additive adverb (e.g., too, either), are a particular type of stripping. On the basis of new corpus data in English and French, we show that such fragments do not always have a verbal clause as their antecedent, and that when they do, different kinds of mismatch are possible between a verbal equivalent and the actual fragment. This challenges most approaches based on syntactic reconstruction. We also show that their interpretation is more flexible than previously thought, since they can be used for interrogative, exclamatory, or ordering purposes. We distinguish between their contrastive (non-coreferent) use (A: John left. B: Me too.) and emphatic (coreferent) use (A: John left. B: HIM too!). We propose a direct interpretation analysis that resorts to no syntactic reconstruction of a verbal clause. The proposed analysis, developed within the framework of construction-based HPSG, allows us to capture not only their properties sharing with other fragments (short answers and negative stripping) but also their unique constructional properties.

Keywords: additive adverb; direct interpretation; ellipsis; English; fragment; French; presupposition; stripping

Corresponding author: Jong-Bok Kim, Department of English Linguistics and Literature, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea, E-mail: jongbok@khu.ac.kr

We thank Gabriela Bîlbîie, Jonathan Ginzburg, Philip Miller, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments, Carole Millot and Ruoxan Li for their work on the French corpus data, Heeyeon Kim for her work on English data, and the EFL LabEx for its support (ANR-10-LABX-0083). This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2017S1A2A2041092).

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Published Online: 2022-07-20

Published in Print: 2022-09-27

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https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2022-2095

Keywords for this article

additive adverb; direct interpretation; ellipsis; English; fragment; French; presupposition; stripping