Three Types of Fragments

This study reviews the three types of approaches toward ellipsis that Stainton(2006) categorized based on the view of up to which level a fragment is supposed to have elided elements, that is, ellipsissyntactic, ellipsissemantic, and ellipsispragmatic. First, it is argued that a fragment occurring without the linguistic antecedent should be regarded as an instance of ellipsissemantic as Merchant (2007) claimed rather than ellipsispragmatic as Stainton claimed. It is shown that Merchant's view that seemingly non-propositional fragmentary expressions are actually propositions containing hidden free variables fits the perspective of a standard semantic theory such as Montagovian semantics. Second, after two types of fragments occurring as answers to questions in Korean, that is, case-marked fragments (CMF) and caseless fragments (CLF), are examined, it is argued that while case-marked fragments can be viewed as syntactic ellipsis, caseless fragmentary answers are not ellipsis, but term answers in the sense of Stechow & Zimmermann (1984). Specifically, it is claimed that a CLF serves as an argument to the function for the preceding wh-question, based on a Functional approach to semantics of questions (Krifka 2001 among others), whereby it eventually forms a semantic proposition which in turn conveys the declarative force. It is concluded that there are three types of fragments after all in English and Korean with respect to whether or not the fragments have unpronounced syntactic or semantic structures, which do not coincide with Stainton's three-way distinction.