Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS'05) Aix-en-Provence, France September 10-12, 2005

A Cross-Linguistic Look at VP-Ellipsis and Verbal Speech Errors

Ellen Thompson

Florida International University, USA

This paper argues that consideration of spontaneous speech errors provides insight into cross-linguistic analyses of syntactic phenomena. In particular, I claim that differences in the distribution of non-parallel VP-Ellipsis constructions in English and German, as well as variation in the spontaneously-occurring verbal speech errors, is explained by a parametric analysis of variation in the inflectional systems of the two languages.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Thompson, Ellen (2005): "A cross-linguistic look at VP-ellipsis and verbal speech errors", In DiSS-2005, 163-164.