VP ellipsis generally requires a syntactically matching antecedent. However, many documented examples exist where the antecedent is not appropriate. Kehler, 533–575. 2002, Coherence, Reference and the Theory of Grammer, CSLI Publications. Stanford.) proposed an elegant theory which predicts a syntactic antecedent for an elided VP is required only for a certain discourse coherence relation, not for cause-effect relations. Most of the data Kehler used to motivate his theory come from corpus studies and thus do not consist of true minimal (...) pairs. We report five experiments testing predictions of the coherence theory, using standard minimal pair materials. The results raise questions about the empirical basis for coherence theory because a syntactically-matching antecedent is preferred for all coherence relations, not just resemblance relations. Further, strict identity readings, which should not be available when a syntactic antecedent is required, are influenced by parallelism per se, holding the discourse coherence relation constant. This draws into question the causal role of coherence relations in processing VP ellipsis. (shrink)

The aim of our paper is to present noun phrase ellipsis as a cohesive tie in the Macedonian language. We will start our paper briefly discussing a few definitions of the term ellipsis, emphasizing our understanding of this term, and more concretely its meaning when occurring in the NP. Namely, we define ellipsis as a complex phenomenon. In linguistics, it means the omitting of linguistic elements that need to be understood from the context, where the recipient should (...) adequately fill the grammatically allowable gap. Then we will refer to different kinds of ellipsis in Macedonian, starting with our main issue - ellipsis in the noun phrase. Elliptical NP is cohesive and usually refers anaphorically to another NP. But the main question is how much of the full noun phrase is involved in the elliptical NP in Macedonian. For that purpose, we will analyze examples to define which elements of the NP can be omitted and under which conditions. Examples of cataphoric ellipsis are also included. When there is an ellipsis of the center of the phrase, the other element of the NP functions as the center of the phrase. For more precision research, we will use examples of different functional styles in Macedonian. The examples will be given first in Macedonian, and then translated into English. Our conclusion will be presented through graphs. (shrink)

The term ellipsis has been applied to a wide range of phenomena across the centuries, from any situation in which words appear to be missing (in St. Isidore’s definition), to a much narrower range of particular constructions. Ellipsis continues to be of central interest to theorists of language exactly because it represents a situation where the usual form/meaning mappings, the algorithms, structures, rules, and constraints that in nonelliptical sentences allow us to map sounds and gestures onto their corresponding (...) meanings, break down. In fact, in ellipsis, the usual mappings seems to be entirely absent. In ellipsis, there is meaning without form. VP-ellipsis and sluicing are two of the best investigated instances of ellipsis and generally show remarkable similarities in their licensing requirements, both usually necessitating some equivalent antecedent which is subject to some kind of parallelism. It is no exaggeration to say that debates over the nature of this parallelism have formed the core of most of the generative work on ellipsis over the last forty years. Almost all conceivable positions on the parallelism question have been explored and advanced, and these debates are important exactly because they are often used to argue for the necessity of one or another kind of linguistic representation. Most of the debate is located in the arena of semantics and abstract syntactic structures—it is clear that surface syntactic or phonological parallelism is not at stake—and as such, elliptical structures often play an important role in fundamental ontological debates in linguistics. The logic is clear: if the parallelism or identity conditions found in ellipsis resolution require reference to certain kinds of objects, then our theories of linguistic competence must countenance objects of that kind. In generative linguistics, research has focused on two sets of constructions. Central examples of the first set, drawn from English, include sluicing as in (1), verb phrase ellipsis (VP-ellipsis) as in (2), and NP-ellipsis (or N -ellipsis) 2 as in (3).. (shrink)

Categorial grammar is well-known for its elegant analysis of coordination enabled by the flexible notion of constituency it entertains. However, to date, no systematic study exists that examines whether this analysis has any obvious empirical advantage over alternative analyses of nonconstituent coordination available in phrase structure-based theories of syntax. This paper attempts precisely such a comparison. We compare the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations in categorial grammar with an ellipsis-based analysis of the same phenomena in the recent (...) HPSG literature. We provide a set of empirical evidence, consisting of cases in which non-canonical coordinations interact with scopal operators of various sorts, which systematically falsifies the predictions of the latter, ‘linearization-based’ ellipsis approach to coordination. We propose an alternative analysis in a variant of categorial grammar called Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar. The proposed framework builds on both the Lambek-inspired variants of categorial grammar and a more recent line of work modelling word order via a lambda calculus for the prosodic component. The flexible syntax–semantics interface of this framework straightforwardly captures the interactions between non-canonical coordinations and scopal expressions, demonstrating the broader empirical payoff of the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations pioneered by Steedman :523–568, 1985; Linguist Philos 13:207–263, 1990) and Dowty hitherto not explicitly recognized in the literature. (shrink)

The paper investigates an elliptical construction, Clarification Ellipsis, that occurs in dialogue. We suggest that this provides data that demonstrates that updates resulting from utterances cannot be defined in purely semantic terms, contrary to the prevailing assumptions of existing approaches to dynamic semantics. We offer a computationally oriented analysis of the resolution of ellipsis in certain cases of dialogue clarification. We show that this goes beyond standard techniques used in anaphora and ellipsis resolution and requires operations on (...) highly structured, linguistically heterogeneous representations. We characterize these operations and the representations on which they operate. We offer an analysis couched in a version of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar combined with a theory of information states (IS) in dialogue. We sketch an algorithm for the process of utterance integration in IS which leads to grounding or clarification. The account proposed here has direct applications to the theory of attitude reports, an issue which is explored briefly in the concluding remarks of the paper. (shrink)

We present a new method for characterizing the interpretive possibilities generated by elliptical constructions in natural language. Unlike previous analyses, which postulate ambiguity of interpretation or derivation in the full clause source of the ellipsis, our analysis requires no such hidden ambiguity. Further, the analysis follows relatively directly from an abstract statement of the ellipsis interpretation problem. It predicts correctly a wide range of interactions between ellipsis and other semantic phenomena such as quantifier scope and bound anaphora. (...) Finally, although the analysis itself is stated nonprocedurally, it admits of a direct computational method for generating interpretations. (shrink)

Using the LDSNL model of utterance interpretation being developed by Gabbay and Kempson , this paper demonstrates how the dynamics of the proof process adopted explains configurational restrictions imposed on the interpretation of elliptical fragments. The blurring of traditional semantic and syntactic dichotomies in the LDSNL proof-theoretic reconstruction of interpretation successfully provides a basis for predicting the array of variation displayed by different elliptical forms. The logic adopted is a composite system of a type logic nested within a database logic. (...) Two resource-sensitive sub-types of Conditional Introduction form the basis for explaining the ellipsis data. The result is a demonstration of how the simple device of adding labels to an inference system can provide a useful tool not only at the meta-logic level of comparing alternative logic and grammar formalisms, but also at the level of explaining natural language data. (shrink)

Beautiful passages are passages of ‘pure presence’ inasmuch as they cannot be separated from an absence, from an absence that cannot be revoked by restoring a ‘pure presence’. Beautiful passages are passages that move and inspire because they do not withhold anything, though their gift and their surrender lies in an ellipsis that is essential to ‘pure presence’ and that cannot be sidestepped, as if a remainder, a reserve, or a surplus inhered in them. It is impossible to get (...) a grip on beautiful passages. They are riddles that have been solved but persist in the midst of their solution and do not forfeit any of their enigmaticalness. Their beauty resides in an experience of intensity, in an experience based on an elision, on a tightening and an averting. Such averting is an immediate turning towards the one who feels the intensity, touching and stimulating him as a consequence. This paper explores the question: Are there beautiful passages in Of Grammatology? (shrink)

This paper addresses a phenomenon in which certain word-parts can be omitted. The evidence shows that the full range of data cannot be captured by a sublexical analysis, since the phenomena can be observed both in phrasal and in lexical environments. It is argued that a form of deletion is involved, and that the phenomena—lexical or otherwise—are subject to the same phonological, semantic, and syntactic constraints. In the formalization that is proposed, all of the above constraints are cast in a (...) parallel and declarative fashion, in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag Head-driven phrase structure grammar, 1994), since the various levels of linguistic description are locally and simultaneously available. Building on recent accounts of ellipsis, this paper proposes a unified and general account of word-part ellipsis and phrasal ellipsis. (shrink)

It is a near truism of philosophy of language that sentences are prior to words--that they are the only things that fundamentally have meaning. Robert's Stainton's study interrogates this idea, drawing on a wide body of evidence to argue that speakers can and do use mere words, not sentences, to communicate complex thoughts.

The little francophone community of Port-au-Port Peninsula in Newfoundland is particularly representative of non-standard French spoken in North America. This paper tries to elaborate a grammatical analysis in order to justify the transcriptions of verb forms in the Dictionnaire des régionalismes de Terre-Neuve. In the sentence “I passait les maisons, [bladʒe] ac le monde”, for instance, [bladʒe] could be interpreted as “blaguait” or “blaguer.” In standard French, the same sentence could be translated as “il allait de porte en porte parler (...) avec les gens” or “il allait de porte en porte, parlait avec les gens.” The omission of the subject pronoun seems to allow the transition toward a unmarked verb form either under a short form, limited to the radical of the verb, without any flexional mark like an imperative form, or a full form, like what Remacle calls “infinitif substitut.” The last stade of this evolution is the nominal phrase, whose use is widely spread in popular French, where it often follows a verb phrase. (shrink)

Our first aim in this paper is to respond to four novel objections in Jason Stanley's ‘Context and Logical Form’. Taken together, those objections attempt to debunk our prior claims that one can perform a genuine speech act by using a sub‐sentential expression—where by ‘sub‐sentential expression’ we mean an ordinary word or phrase, not embedded in any larger syntactic structure. Our second aim is to make it plausible that, pace Stanley, there really are pragmatic determinants of the literal truth‐conditional content (...) of speech acts. We hope to achieve this second aim precisely by defending the genuineness of sub‐sentential speech acts. Given our two aims, it is necessary to highlight briefly their connection—which we do in the first part of the Introduction. Following that, we introduce Stanley's novel objections. This is the role of the second part of the Introduction. We offer our rebuttals in Section 2 (against ‘shorthand’) and Section 3 (against syntactic ellipsis, among other things). (shrink)

Examines poetic language in the work of Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot.

We offer a computational analysis of the resolution of ellipsis in certain cases of dialogue clarification. We show that this goes beyond standard techniques used in anaphora and ellipsis resolution and requires operations on highly structured, linguistically heterogeneous representations. We characterize these operations and the representations on which they operate. We offer an analysis couched in a version of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar combined with a theory of information states (IS).

_Examines poetic language in the work of Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot._.

Our first aim in this paper is to respond to four novel objections in Jason Stanley's 'Context and Logical Form'. Taken together, those objections attempt to debunk our prior claims that one can perform a genuine speech act by using a subsentential expression—where by 'subsentential expression' we mean an ordinary word or phrase, not embedded in any larger syntactic structure. Our second aim is to make it plausible that, pace Stanley, there really are pragmatic determinants of the literal truthconditional content (...) of speech acts. We hope to achieve this second aim precisely by defending the genuineness of subsentential speech acts. Given our two aims, it is necessary to highlight briefly their connection—which we do in the first part of the Introduction. Following that, we introduce Stanley's novel objections. This is the role of the second part of the Introduction. We offer our rebuttals in Section 2 (against 'shorthand') and Section 3 (against syntactic ellipsis, among other things). (shrink)

Masculine/feminine pairs of human-denoting nouns in Greek fall into three distinct classes under predicative ellipsis: those that license ellipsis of their counterpart regardless of gender, those that only license ellipsis of a same-gendered noun, and those in which the masculine noun of the pair licenses ellipsis of the feminine version, but not vice versa. The three classes are uniform in disallowing any gender mismatched ellipses in argument uses, however. This differential behavior of gender in nominal (...) class='Hi'>ellipsis can be captured by positing that human-denoting nouns in Greek, while syntactically and morphological uniform in showing a masculine/feminine contrast, do not all encode this contrast in their semantics. Under a semantic identity theory of ellipsis, the attested variation in nominal ellipses in Greek is posited to derive from the fact that nominal ellipsis has two possible sources: a nominal constituent can be elided (true ellipsis), or a null nominal proform can be used (model-theoretic anaphora). (shrink)

Jason Merchant (2004, and Chap. 3, this volume) proposes to account for all speech acts performed with “fragments,” whether in discourse-initial position or otherwise, by appealing to syntactic ellipsis. Though his proposal is insightful, I offer empirical and methodological considerations against it. Empirical problems include: (a) His alleged “elliptical sentences” do not embed the way they should; (b) in some cases where Merchant requires fronting to take place, it is blocked – either by an island (e.g., in English) or (...) because nonsubject fronting is not allowed in the language in question (e.g., in Malagasy); and (c) his “limited ellipsis” strategy, allowing do it and this is __ to be licensed in discourse-initial position, is not general enough. The methodological problem is that, his protests to the contrary, Merchant’s view multiplies hidden structure without necessity. (shrink)

Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VP-ellipsis facts fall into place if the head that determines voice is external (...) to the phrase being elided, here argued to be v P; such an account can only be framed in approaches that allow for the separation of syntactic features from the heads on which they are morphologically realized. Alternatives to this syntactic, articulated view of ellipsis and voice either undergenerate or overgenerate. (shrink)

One of the most startling, and hence theoretically challenging, properties of wh-movement in Sluicing is that it can move wh-phrases out of islands, an important observation which goes back to Ross (1969). Equally challenging is the fact that similar wh-movement out of VP Ellipsis sites remains for the most part illicit. Briefly put, it seems that for a wide range of cases, deletion of an IP containing an island voids the effect of that island for wh-movement, while deletion of (...) a VP containing an island does not. This chapter investigates one aspect of this puzzling dichotomy with respect to island repair, and attempts to show that an interesting and partly novel range of data follow if island deviancies come about due to illicit traces of intermediate movement, working in tandem with a constraint on ellipsis operative in structures that host wh-movement. I will argue that a wide range of islands are indeed active at PF, but not in the way that this claim has usually been understood thus far. Instead of the island node itself being responsible for the degradation in acceptability, I will show that the data support the idea that it is the traces of wh-movement outside the island itself which trigger a PF-crash. I begin with some relevant Background on Sluicing, given in section 6.1, before taking up the Sluicing data in section 6.2 and the VP Ellipsis facts in section 6.3. (shrink)

In this essay, I explain how certain suggestions put forth by Frege. Wittgenstein, and Schlick regarding the interpretation of indexical expressions may be incorporated within a systematic semantic account. I argue that the 'hybrid' approach they propose is preferable to more conventional systems, in particular when it comes to the interpretation of cases of cross-contextual ellipsis. I also explain how the hybrid view entails certain important and independently motivated distinctions among contextually dependent expressions, for instance between 'here' and 'local'.

Pseudogapping is no misnomer. Despite the many tempting similarities, Gapping and Pseudogapping are distinct constructions. Pseudogapping is a special instance of VP Ellipsis, while Gapping, I will argue, is a special instance of across-the-board movement. Squeezing Gapping into across-the-board movement has its own discomforts, however, which I will suggest can be remedied by re-tailoring our syntax to include string-based output constraints. I give a sketch of one such alteration that involves apparent Left Branch Condition violations.

Raquel FERN ´ ANDEZ, Jonathan GINZBURG and Shalom LAPPIN Department of Computer Science King’s College London Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK {raquel,ginzburg,lappin}@dcs.kcl.ac.uk..

Fragmentary utterances such as short answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown (...) to follow from an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena. (shrink)

In English, a non-wh-question may have a disjunctive phrase explicitly providing the choices that the question ranges over. For example, in (1), the disjunction or not indicates that the the choice is between the positive and the negative polarity for the relevant proposition, as spelled out in the yes/no (yn)-question reading (2) and in the answers (2a,b). Another example is (3). The disjunction in (3) can be understood as providing the choices that the question ranges over, hence giving rise to (...) the alternative (alt-)reading in (4) and eliciting the answers in (4a,b). (Cf. Karttunen (1977) and Higginbotham (1993) for the semantics of yn/alt-questions). (shrink)

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases, such as a discourse-initial utterance of “From France” to indicate the provenance of an item, provide evidence for the reality of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. I consider recent attempts to treat such discourse-initial fragments as linguistic ellipsis of some kind while accommodating the difference between these cases and accepted types of ellipsis such as sluicing and gapping. I claim that the mechanisms they posit to save an ellipsis story (...) have no role in an account of performance. An argument against the enrichment approach from the indeterminacy of the content of subsentential utterances is discussed, and refuted, and it is shown how this indeterminacy is accommodated in a contextualist pragmatic theory. (shrink)

The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials (...) feasible after all. -/- Editor's comment: To find the contribution, please go to item 16 of the URL, which contains the full text. Professor Merchant has permitted this. (shrink)

There have been a variety of arguments over the decades both for and against syntactic Neg Raising. Two recent papers :559–576, 2018; Crowley in Nat Lang Semant 27, 1–17, 2019) focus on the interaction of NR effects with ellipsis. These papers examine similar types of data, but come to opposite conclusion: Jacobson shows that the ellipsis facts provide evidence against syntactic NR, whereas Crowley argues in favor of syntactic NR. The present paper revisits the evidence, showing that the (...) key case in Crowley that he uses to argue for syntactic NR contains a confound, while the broader set of evidence in Jacobson continues to support the non-syntactic account. In addition, I reply here to an argument for syntactic NR due originally to Prince and Smaby and elaborated on by Crowley. The key generalization can be shown to disappear once contexts are carefully controlled for. Moreover, Crowley extends the Prince/Smaby argument to show that no inference-based account of NR can survive, but this conclusion rests on the claim that there are cases where ever is vacuous; I show that this is not the case. I also consider the question—discussed in much previous literature—of why under the syntactic approach to NR the class of predicates allowing NR is limited to just those which easily support an Excluded Middle inference. Crowley attempts to provide a principled explanation, speculating that NR is allowed just in case it is ‘semantically vacuous’. I argue that this proposal is problematic and so the challenge to syntactic approaches remains. Finally, I provide a new argument against syntactic NR which centers on the behavior of guess. (shrink)

The debate between representationalists and anti-representationalists as I construe it in this chapter is a debate about whether truth-conditions are or should be assigned directly to natural language sentences (NLSs) – the anti-representationalist view – or whether they are or should be assigned instead to mental representations (MRs) that are related in some appropriate way to these NLSs. On the representationalist view, these MRs are related to NLSs in virtue of the fact that the MRs are the output of an (...) interpretive process that has as its input both representations of the lexico-syntactic structure of the NLSs and relevant non-linguistic assumptions that are accessible in the current conversational context. On this conception, language interpretation is a process of developing sentential forms into fully propositional forms, and it is these propositional forms that are the primary bearers of truth-conditional content, and are candidates for model-theoretic interpretation, not the NLSs themselves. (shrink)

The restricted semantic ellipsis hypothesis, we have argued, is committed to an enormous number of multiply ambiguous expressions, the introduction of which gains us no extra explanatory power. We should, therefore, reject it. We should also spurn the original version since: (a) it entails the restricted version and (b) it incorrectly declares that, whenever a speaker makes an assertion by uttering an unembedded word or phrase, the expression uttered has illocutionary force.Once rejected, the semantic ellipsis hypothesis cannot account (...) for the many exceptions to the syntactic ellipsis hypothesis. So, we can safely infer that the Claim is true.(1)The Claim: Speakers can make assertions by uttering ordinary, unembedded, words and phrases.To the degree that the Claim reallyis in tension with the primacy of sentences (i.e., the view that (a) only sentences can be used to make assertions and (b) only sentences are meaningful in isolation) this doctrine must also be rejected. (shrink)

This paper concerns the question whether reflexives can have strict readings in VP-ellipsis. It is argued that the possibility for strict interpretation is determined by a syntactic factor: subordination of the elided clause relative to the antecedent clause facilitates strict interpretation, whereas coordination disfavors it. This contrast is shown to be predictable by theories of syntactic reconstruction which assume that a surface reflexive corresponds to a bound variable at the point of ellipsis reconstruction, and where the binder has (...) scope over a subordinated ellipsis but not over a coordinated ellipsis. One possibility is that the binder is the reflexive itself, moved at LF. A further factor, namely the possibility of speakers reinterpreting the ellipsis as a deep anaphor, accounts for why strict readings are in fact weakly acceptable in coordinated ellipsis. Previous accounts of ellipsis and reflexives are evaluated in light of the new data. (shrink)

This paper argues that verb phrase ellipsis requires contrast. The central observation is that ellipsis is ungrammatical in tautologous conditionals; e.g., *_If John wins, then he does_. Ellipsis is correctly ruled out by a focus-based theory of ellipsis (Rooth 1992a, b ), but one that crucially imports focus’s requirement for contrast: an elliptical constituent must have an antecedent that is not merely an alternative to it, but a ‘proper’ alternative. An explanation in terms of contrast failure (...) proves superior to alternative explanations in terms of triviality and matching form. Showing as much catalogues what counts for contrast in ellipsis, encompassing negation, questions, and intensionality. Subjecting ellipsis to a contrast requirement is in direct conflict with the traditional analysis of MaxElide effects (Takahashi and Fox 2005 ), favouring alternative explanations (e.g., Jacobson 2019a, b ), perhaps in terms of contrast itself (Griffiths 2019 ). Overall, this paper establishes that contrast has explanatory power in ellipsis licensing. (shrink)

This article explores how cinema’s material discontinuity can stimulate the attention of a distracted audience and prompt reflectionon historical violence. By examining Yasujiro Ozu’s Sanma no aji (1962) and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), it argues that ellipsis is a powerful technique used to construct an argument about the relationship between war and women’s social roles. Specifically, the article analyses how these films use the ellipsis to enhance the resistance of women who act against the official thread of (...) History. Finally, the findings highlight the potential of cinema to challenge dominant narratives and encourage alternative approaches to representing violence and social roles. (shrink)

We investigate the underexplored question of when speakers make use of the omission phenomenon verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English given that the full form is also available to them. We base the interpretation of our results on the well-established information-theoretic Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis: Speakers tend to distribute processing effort uniformly across utterances and avoid regions of low information by omitting redundant material through, e.g., VPE. We investigate the length of the omittable VP and its predictability in (...) context as sources of redundancy which lead to larger or deeper regions of low information and an increased pressure to use ellipsis. We use both naturalness rating and self-paced reading studies in order to link naturalness patterns to potential processing difficulties. For the length effects our rating and reading results support a UID account. Surprisingly, we do not find an effect of the context on the naturalness and the processing of VPE. We suggest that our manipulation might have been too weak or not effective to evidence such an effect. (shrink)

Speakers often use ordinary words and phrases, unembedded in any sentence, to perform speech acts—or so it appears. In some cases appearances are deceptive: The seemingly lexical/phrasal utterance may really be an utterance of a syntactically eplliptical sentence. I argue however that, at least sometimes, plain old words and phrases are used on their own. The use of both words/phrases and elliptical sentences leads to two consequences: 1. Context must contribute more to utterance meaning than is often supposed. Here's why: (...) The semantic type of normal words and phrases is non-proppositional, even after the usual contextual features are added . Yet an utterance of a word/phrase can be fully propositional. 2. Often, a hearer does not need to know the exact identity of the expression uttered, to understand an utterance. The reason: Typically, words/phrases in context will sound the same, and mean the same, as some elliptical sentence token. (shrink)