Leiden University Student Repository

Armishaw, Lee (2015)

A prosodic account of fragments

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

The aim of this thesis is to provide a novel account for the linguistic phenomenon that is commonly referred to as ‘fragments’. I will provide a novel account, utilising the syntax-prosody interface, to account for the fact that fragments appear to be derived from a larger structure. I aim to deal with some of the inadequacies of previous syntactic analyses, and to provide an account that may be better reflected in the data. The analysis that I will detail in this thesis will treat the deletion we find in fragments as prosodic deletion: such an approach has not been attempted so far. Importantly, whilst the main focus of this thesis is investigating the deletion in fragments, we will see that we may also be able to account for further cases of ellipsis, such as sluicing, right node raising and gapping.

Prosody

ellipsis

fragments

syntax

Author

Armishaw, Lee

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Theoretical Linguistics and Cognition

Supervisors

Lipták, Anikó

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en