A Theory of Parallelism and the Case of VP Ellipsis

Jerry R. Hobbs, Andrew Kehler

Abstract: We provide a general account of parallelism in discourse, and apply it to the special case of resolving possible readings for instances of VP ellipsis. We show how several problematic examples are accounted for in a natural and straightforward fashion. The generality of the approach makes it directly applicable to a variety of other types of ellipsis and reference.