Experimental and Corpus-based Approaches to Ellipsis (ECBAE) 2022

Final Call for Papers

We are very pleased to announce that we are planning to submit a proposal for the fourth edition of the Experimental and Corpus-based Approaches to Ellipsis (ECBAE) workshop to the international conference Societas Linguistica Europaea SLE 2022, which will be held at the University of Bucharest between 24 August and 27 August 2022.

The main purpose of the ECBAE workshops is to bring together researchers who have been working on elliptical phenomena (VP ellipsis, sluicing, stripping, gapping, RNR, etc.) in various languages, with special emphasis on solid empirical data, specifically through experimentation and corpus investigations. Contributions will be welcome concerning (i) the specific experimental methodologies being used in psycholinguistics, and how they can be improved to give more reliable and interpretable results; and (ii) the way corpus data can be brought to bear on theoretical questions, and to improve the results of psycholinguistic experiments, specifically by increasing the naturalness of the materials by providing new hypotheses.

This iteration of ECBAE also especially welcomes submissions addressing issues surrounding ellipsis identity. We are particularly interested in contributions tackling one or more of the following questions: I. How can we define identity conditions between ellided materials and antecendent materials from the discourse? E.g.: – Must identity conditions include syntactic descriptions (phrase markers / LFs / Structured Meanings)? – Alternatively, can identity conditions be stated over purely semantic or pragmatic objects, with no associated „syntactic forms“ (e.g., syntactically unstructured propositions, common ground inventory, etc.)? – Are hybrid conditions needed that reference both of the above? II. What precisely are the relations that have to hold between elliptical utterances and their antecedents in the discourse? E.g.: – What role (if any) do discourse-structuring mechanisms, such as coherence / anaphoric accessibility rela­tions, QUDs and/or contrastivity, play in licensing ellipsis? – Do we need different identity conditions and/or discourse relations for different types of ellipsis (e.g., clausal versus predicate ellipsis)?

– Also, can antecedents for ellipsis be accommodated (i.e., have no explicit mention the preceding discourse), and, if so, what are the restrictions on accommodation?

If you are interested in submitting a paper to the ECBAE 2022, please send a provisional abstract (max. 300 words) to ecbae4@gmail.com mailto:ecbae4@gmail.com before 11 November 2021, and we will prepare the workshop proposal based on your preliminary submissions, and submit it before 20 November 2021. Notification of acceptance/rejection will be by 15 December 2021. After our workshop proposal has been accepted, all preliminary workshop participants will be invited to submit their full abstracts in Easychair before 15 January 2022.

We are looking forward to receiving your preliminary contribution to our next ECBAE workshop.

Best,

Gabriela Bîlbîie, James Griffiths, Volker Struckmeier