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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.821-845
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 05 Aug 2022 Revised 23 Aug 2022 Accepted 31 Aug 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202208.821

English if (not)-stripping Constructions: A Direct Interpretation Approach

Seulkee Park ; Jong-Bok Kim
(1st author) Visiting Professor, Institute for the Study of Language and Information, Kyung Hee Univ., Tel: 02) 961-0211 seulkeepark@khu.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Kyung Hee Univ., Tel: 02) 961-0892 jongbok@khu.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

English if-stripping has at least two subtypes: if-stripping and negative if-stripping. As in the typical stripping, its remnant can be either a lexical or phrasal remnant, and it receives a sentential interpretation. The paper reviews sentential analyses that capture the propositional meaning of the stripped clause through movement-cum-deletion operations. The paper discusses attested corpus data that challenge the postulation of sentential sources and argues for a direct interpretation approach that directly generates if (not)-stripping and assigns the propositional meaning through discourse-based proper resolution processes.

Keywords:

if-stripping, Bare Argument Ellipsis, subordinate clauses, direct interpretation, discourse

Acknowledgments

Part of this paper is taken from Park's (2022) dissertation. Earlier versions of this paper were poster-presented at the 46th annual Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC 46) on March 19, 2022, and paper-presented at the 14th annual meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society (ILLS 14) on February 25, 2022. We thank the audiences at the conferences and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. Any remaining errors are solely our responsibility.

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