@article{THESIS,
      recid = {3928},
      author = {Sun, Yenan},
      title = {Incompleteness Under Discussion},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-06},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {289},
      abstract = {This dissertation re-examines a puzzling restriction on  assertability of certain zero-marked sentences in the  grammar of Mandarin Chinese, the so called incompleteness  phenomenon (Kong 1994; He 1994; Tang and Lee 2000; Gu 2007;  Tsai 2008; Guo 2015; Sybesma 2019; Tang 2022, among  others). Unlike the majority of the existing analyses which  attribute incompleteness to some context-free grammatical  requirement, I establish the novel generalization that  incompleteness is sensitive to the explicit or contextually  implied Questions Under Discussion (van Kuppevelt 1995;  Ginzburg 1996; Roberts 1996/2012; Farkas and Bruce 2010),  which straightforwardly captures a wide range of apparently  heterogeneous conditions that render incompleteness absent  in an explanatory way. Moreover, I relate incompleteness to  a set of similarly constrained zero-marked forms in other  languages, showing that those zero-marked forms in Mandarin  can be syntactically and semantically well-formed. The  dissertation provides a first formal pragmatic account of  incompleteness, which attributes the two subcases of  incompleteness discussed here, temporal incompleteness and  degree incompleteness, to different pragmatic mechanisms.  For the temporal case, incompleteness arises because of two  incompatible R-based and Q-based implicatures (Grice 1967;  Horn 1984). For the degree case, incompleteness arises due  to a lexical pre- supposition encoded by the zero-marked  sentences. The pragmatic account explains the  QUD-sensitivity of incompleteness as well as captures  native speakers’ intuition towards an incomplete sentence  that it is ‘unfinished’ instead of outright grammatical.  Under the current analysis, the degradedness is attributed  to the failure of a context to avoid the conflict of  implicature or to satisfy the presupposition, which can be  potentially salvaged when the utterance is continued due to  the dynamic nature of the context. The dissertation not  only makes a variety of empirical and theoretical  contributions to the incompleteness phenomenon, but also  shows another effective cross-linguistic implementation of  the notion of Question Under Discussion and the related  tools in formal discourse theories including alternatives,  implicatures, and presuppositions.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3928},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3928},
}