Answer ellipsis

Answer ellipsis (= answer fragments) is a type of ellipsis that occurs in answers to questions. Answer ellipsis appears very frequently in any dialogue, and it is present in probably all languages. Of the types of ellipsis mechanisms, answer fragments behave most like sluicing, a point that shall be illustrated below.

Standard instances of answer ellipsis occur in answers to questions. A question is posed, and the answer is formulated in such a manner to be maximally efficient. Just the constituent that is focused by the question word is uttered. The elided material in the examples in this article is indicated using a smaller font and subscripts:

This sort of data could easily be expanded. An answer fragment is possible for any constituent that can be questioned using a question word. An important aspect of the elided material of answer ellipsis is that it usually does not correspond to a constituent. This fact is problematic for theories of ellipsis, a point which is examined below.

Answer ellipsis behaves curiously in a couple of noteworthy ways. The answer fragment should not, for instance, encompass more than the focused constituent:

Either just the focused constituent (i.e. the constituent that is focused by the question word in the question) or the entire sentence must appear as the answer. If an intermediate constituent appears, the answer is unacceptable.

Another noteworthy aspect of answer ellipsis is that a negation can be part of the elided material. Answer ellipsis is like sluicing in this regard, but unlike gapping, stripping, VP-ellipsis, and pseudogapping, e.g.

These data demonstrate that answer ellipsis and sluicing have something important in common that distinguishes them from other ellipsis mechanisms.

Theoretical accounts of answer ellipsis are faced with the same basic problem that challenges the accounts of other ellipsis mechanisms. This problem revolves around the fact that the elided material often does not form a constituent in surface syntax. The following trees illustrate the problem. The tree on the left is a constituency-based tree of a phrase structure grammar, and the tree on the right is the corresponding dependency-based tree of a dependency grammar:

In both trees, the elided material I said, which is indicated using the lighter font shade, does not form as a constituent. In other words, it does not qualify as a complete subtree. The theory of ellipsis is therefore challenged to produce an analysis of such cases that can account for the fact that ellipsis appears to be eliding non-constituent units.

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