Typical event sequences as licensors of direct object ellipsis in Russian

Abstract

Abstract This paper extends the computationally-oriented theory of ellipsis presented in McShane’s A Theory of Ellipsis (2005) by introducing the feature typical event sequence. It is argued that, in Russian, the presence of a typical sequence of events in a pair of clauses can be the key feature licensing the ellipsis of the latter’s direct object. The linguistic analysis contributes to a larger cognitive modeling effort aimed at configuring language-endowed intelligent agents with human-level language understanding capabilities.