So let’s talk about leaving stuff out.
When it comes to understanding who we are, looking to our past can often shape our view
of the present, and even guide us towards our future.
It can make sense of what’s unclear, and help us fill in what’s missing.
But if our histories determine what’s to come, are we always doomed to repeat them,
or can we break free of the cycle and choose our own path?
And are we fated to regret the things we’ve left unsaid, or is it true that — sometimes —
silence really is golden?
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
A big part of understanding how language works is understanding exactly how meaning connects
up with form — so, understanding how the sounds we make with our mouths, or the gestures we
make with our bodies, can express our thoughts.
A word like “purple” can represent a colour, while a noun like “man” can point to some guy!
Smoosh these things together and, like something out of a comic book, you get a whole new character!
A brand new thought created by overlapping the first two.
But what happens when we leave words out?
Can we speak through silence?
And if so, how exactly does that work?
Consider the sentence “Sometimes Malcolm can reach her, and sometimes he can’t.”
It’s so easy for us to get the meaning that sometimes Malcolm can’t reach her, that
we kind of forget that that part of the sentence never actually got said out loud.
It’s obvious to us that everything after “and” means just that, even if that isn’t
what’s spelled out.
Each of these examples are cases of ellipsis, or meaning without form.
In a way, ellipsis is a kind of superpower, where we intuit what’s missing without any conscious effort.
More specifically, under the right circumstances, it’s the phenomenon of leaving out a word,
or a string of words, that would otherwise have to be said out loud.
But while there are many different kinds of ellipsis, the act of cutting certain words
out when we speak isn’t random, so it’s worth taking a minute to explore some of the rules at play.
For one, ellipsis always seems to require some kind of licensor — a word that allows it to happen.
Our first example was of verb phrase, or VP, ellipsis, where the phrase “reach her”
gets left out.
VP ellipsis needs something like “can” or “does” to license it, since we can’t
say something like “Sometimes Malcolm reaches her, and sometimes he not.”
The only way to get it working again is to insert one of those helper verbs, as in “Sometimes
Malcolm reaches her, and sometimes he doesn’t.”
The second restriction is that the material that’s missing always has to match up with
something that came just before.
For instance, out of the blue, the sentence “Trish will only ask for Dorothy’s help
if she needs to”···
can only mean “if she needs to ask for Dorothy’s help.”
And that’s true even in a situation where we all know she’ll ask for help if she needs
to do something else, like get in touch with Max.
Even if it would make perfect sense to fill in that blank that way, in the end the unspoken
verb phrase has to match the wording found inside the preceding clause.
So, ellipsis comes with a kind of identity condition, too.
But even with all the research that’s been done on this topic, ellipsis still presents
us with a fundamental challenge, which is to figure out how it’s possible to express
such precise meaning without any words.
On the one hand, there might be special mechanisms that allow meaning to somehow get ‘copied
over’ from one part of the conversation to another, or filled in by our knowledge of the situation.
On the other, many linguists have supposed that in these elliptical sentences, the words
are actually still there, in their usual place, and are simply just left unexpressed.
Now, that’s a bold statement, but it would go a long way in explaining how it all works.
In fact, it turns out that there’s actually some evidence for this idea, in the form of
what are called “connectivity effects.”
These are ways that the words that are articulated seem to be connected to the words that aren’t,
as if they were still there.
So, take this strange sentence: “I visited every bar where you introduced me to a guy who did.”
It doesn’t sound very good, though with some effort we can work out what it’s supposed
to mean: “I visited all the bars such that you had introduced me to some guy or other
who had visited that bar.”
So what exactly’s going on, here?
Well, let’s think about the relative clause by itself, with the missing verb put back
in its place, at the end; so, “every bar where you introduced me to a guy who visited.”
This still sounds pretty weird, and the reason why is actually something we’ve touched
on in previous episodes.
Specifically, we’ve argued that relative clauses are a lot like questions, and so they
start life with the question word at the end of the clause, and then move it over to the beginning.
When there’s already another question word in there, they kind of get in each other’s way.
And if we force one to the front anyway, the whole thing sort of breaks down.
If this is the right way to think about why our strange sentence sounds so bad, that means
it’s because we’re trying — and failing — to move the question word “where”
out of the verb phrase and past that intervening “who.”
But that means the original verb phrase “visited where” must actually be part of the underlying
structure of the sentence, even if we can’t perceive it.
So it looks as if ellipsis doesn’t mean that things are really, truly gone.
Still, the idea that our sentences are rife with all this invisible structure is a big
claim, so it’s also important to consider some of the more difficult cases that might
call that into question.
Let’s see whether our hypothesis can hold up.
Have a look at this example: “Hogarth can’t prove everyone innocent, but she can Shane,”
meaning she can prove Shane innocent.
In theory, the structure for the second half of that sentence would look something like
this, with the words “prove” and “innocent” right where they should be, just left unspoken.
The problem with the idea that all that structure is still there, even if we can’t hear it,
is that it’s not obvious how this should work.
If ellipsis is generally something that basically ‘hits the mute button’ on certain parts
of a syntactic tree, how do we define the target?
In every case we’ve seen so far, the words that were deleted formed not just a continuous
string of words but a constituent, which is a very important, tight-knit unit in our syntactic theory.
We can’t, for instance, say “He showed up at her apartment once, and then up at a
second time,” only deleting “show” and “apartment.”
Those two words aren’t connected together in a way that excludes “up” and “at.”
When it comes to ellipsis, it’s sort of ‘all or nothing,’ as in “He showed up
at her apartment once, and then a second time.”
So, what can we do here?
The key to solving this mystery actually ends up coming from Irish — specifically, a contrast
found between the northern dialect of Ulster Irish and the southern dialect of Munster Irish.
In the southern dialect, the sentence “I want John to write the sentence” looks like
this, with the object coming after the verb and being marked with genitive case.
In the northern dialect, that same sentence looks like this, with the object coming before
the verb instead, and being marked as accusative.
This alternation is known as object shift, and can also be found within dialects, under
the right conditions.
You can even see something similar in English, where you can say either “He blew up the
facility,” or “He blew the facility up,” with the object shifting over to the left.
And underneath all this shifty behaviour is exactly the pattern we need.
The structure of the embedded clause in the southern dialect looks like this, with the
object staying put.
But in the northern one, the object moves around the verb and cozies up next to that
little word, right there.
That little bit of grammar is specifically there to dress an object up with accusative
case, like the pronoun “them” in English, as opposed to nominative like “they,”
or genitive like “their.”
It’s even in charge of its own dedicated phrase inside each sentence.
And this special phrase offers up a second home to objects in and across dialects of
Irish, if circumstances force them to move out of their original verb phrase.
If languages are more similar than different, and this option exists in English as well,
this extra bit of structure can provide our problem sentence with the escape plan it’s looking for.
In “Hogarth can’t prove everyone innocent, but she can Shane,” the object can swoop
out of the verb phrase before it gets erased, masking the fact that the deleted words really
do form a constituent after all.
So even the toughest sentences manage to fit into our theory of how ellipsis works.
And while research and debate are active, it looks like there’s good reason to think
that silence isn’t always as empty as it first appears.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you filled in all the gaps, you learned that words can express meaning even when they
don’t show up in the sentence; that this process of ellipsis isn’t random, and can
only happen under the right conditions; that it looks like the words that get deleted still
retain some kind of connection to the rest of the sentence; and that sentences which
seem to break the rules on the surface actually fit nicely into our overall theory.
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See you next time! Tìoraidh!