Syntactic analysis for ellipsis handling in coordinated clauses

Abstract

This work is intended as an investigation into elliptical phenomena in natural language. We argue that some types of ellipsis can be resolved at the syntactic level since they are subject to syntactic constraints. We have dealt with four of the major types of ellipsis found in Portuguese, namely: Null VP, Gapping, Stripping and Sluicing. We have used Island Constraints in order to decide on the grammaticality of the sentence. Finally, we have developed and implemented a syntacticallybased algorithm that recovers the elidedconstituents and reconstructs the elliptical clause, when applicable. The linguistic data in this work is drawn primarily from Portuguese, but we believe that the results can also be applied to other languages, such as English.