Diagnosing Ellipsis
Jason Merchant · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013
This chapter discusses some of the diagnostics for ellipsis, including St Isidore’s diagnostic, extraction, agreement, and inverse scope. It also distinguishes diagnostics for ellipsis from those tests or phenomena which are not particularly relevant to deciding the nature of ellipsis, primarily due to the fact that they do not pick out ellipses as a class, generally because the phenomena they are sensitive to are in fact found in a wider range of cases (of which ellipsis may be merely a limiting case). It discusses pragmatic control, sloppy identity, split antecedents, and missing antecedent phenomena.