On the basis of certain semantic intuitions, Barros (2012) argues that ellipsis does not require structural isomorphism between elided structure and its antecedent. We tackle this claim. Semantic intuitions cannot be a pointer to the analysis of silent structure. We provide empirical evidence that raises the question of to what extent semantic intuitions about plausible articulable syntax must inform one’s analysis of silent structure. We conclude that the answer to this question must be crosslinguistically informed. We conjecture that ellipsis introduces ellipsis-specific interpretive mechanisms, so that intuitions about “how the unelided structure would be interpreted” are not empirically relevant.

基于某些语义直觉，Barros (2012) 认为省略号不需要省略结构与其前件之间的结构同构。我们处理这一主张。语义直觉不能成为分析无声结构的指针。我们提供的经验证据提出了一个问题，即关于似是而非的可表达句法的语义直觉必须在多大程度上影响对无声结构的分析。我们得出的结论是，这个问题的答案必须是跨语言的。我们推测省略号引入了特定于省略号的解释机制，因此关于“如何解释未插入的结构”的直觉在经验上是不相关的。