Sloppy identity
The elided VP can be interpreted in at least two ways, as follows: The discussion of "sloppy identity" amongst linguists dates back to a paper by John Robert Ross in 1967,[1] in which Ross identified the interpretational ambiguity in the elided Verb Phrase of the previously stated sentence 1) found in the intro.
Ross tried, without success, to account for "sloppy" identity using strictly syntactic structural relations, and concluded that his theories predicted too many ambiguities.
Bouton's theory of VP-Deletion and Ross' observation of sloppy identity served as an important foundation for linguists to build on.
Many advances followed within the next decade, providing much of the theoretical scaffolding necessary for linguists to address issues of "sloppy identity" up to present day.
Scholars like Noam Chomsky (1955),[4] Ross (1969)[5] and Sag (1976)[1] have suggested the process responsible for VP ellipsis is a syntactic deletion rule applied at the level of PF, this process is named as VP Deletion.
The PF-deletion hypothesis assumes the elided VP is fully syntactically represented but deleted in the phonological component between SPELLOUT and PF.
It suggests that VP deletion is the process that generates sloppy identities because co-indexation needs to occur with respect to binding conditions.
The clauses [John will eat his apple] and [Sam will eat his apple] share an identical VP in the sense they have the same constituent structure, so the second clause can be deleted because it is identical to its antecedent VP.
The clauses are each independent complete sentence structures, so presumably each pronoun would co-index to its referent in its constituent to comply with binding theories.
According to LF-copying, the ambiguity found in sloppy identity is due to different orderings of the copying rules for pronouns and verbs.
Building on the work of Bouton (1970) and Ross (1969), Barbara Partee (1975)[3] developed what has come to be one of the most important and influential approaches to explain VP to date, the Derived VP-Rule, which introduces a null operator at the VP level.
Ivan Sag proposed two logical forms, one of which the coreferential pronoun is replaced by a bound variable.
This is represented in the following sentence: Since the embedded clauses are identical, the logic of this form is that the variable x must be bound to the same noun phrase in both cases.
It is claimed that the deleted VP is recoverable at the level of LF due to alphabetic variance holding between two λ-expressions.
[7] In this deletion approach, the sloppy identity is made possible, first, by the indexing of anaphors, and then by the application of a variable rewriting rule.
It is important to note that any meaning, in this case what Subject the Anaphor "himself" references, is determined at LF, and thus left out of phonetic form.
This is the last step that occurs in PF, leaving the sentence to be phonetically realized as "John blamed himself, and Bill did too."
In his approach to the sloppy identity problem, Williams (1977) adopts the Derived VP Rule as well.
The presence of this rule allows for a sloppy reading because variables are bound by the lambda operator within the same VP.
[9] This theory is based on the assumption that in conversation both participants share a psychological focus towards an entity that is central to their discourse.
Hardt (2003),[10] using this centering theoretical approach, suggests that in discourse, a shift of the focus from one entity to another makes it possible for sloppy readings to occur.
Cross linguistically, sloppy identity is analyzed as a universal problem, found in the basic underlying syntactic structure that all languages share.
For non-English examples and analyses of sloppy identity, such as Japanese,[11] Korean,[12] and Chinese,[13] see the following articles in the references section below.
In the generative framework, it has been argued that the overt counterpart of do-support in English is the shì-support in Modern Mandarin.
'As (2) indicates, both the strict and sloppy readings are equally available, however, the judgement of the sentences above can vary between native speakers of Modern Mandarin.
To improve the overall acceptability of the strict and sloppy reading of (2), Ai (2014) added adverbials to the antecedent clause.
It is questionable to analyze (3) based on addition of adverbials according to the diagnostic of equal distribution in both the strict and sloppy reading.
Ross (1967) proposed that for an elided expression to have a sloppy identity, a pronoun relating to the reading must be c-commanded by its antecedent, as demonstrated in (8a).
Example[15] Example ZhangsaniZhangsanbunotzhidaoknow[taiheweishenmewhybeiPASSma],scolddanbutLisijLisizhidaoknow(shi)beweishenmewhyZhangsani bu zhidao [tai weishenme bei ma], dan Lisij zhidao (shi) weishenmeZhangsan not know he why PASS scold but Lisi know be why"Zhangsan didn't know why he was scolded but Lisi knows why.
