<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P99-1007">
  <Title>Unifying Parallels</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="54" end_page="55" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> It should by now be clear that the DSPtreatment of ellipsis is better seen as a treatment of the effect of semantic parallelism: the equations constrain the interpretation of parallel structures and as a side effect, a number of linguistic phenomena are predicted e.g. VPEresolution, sloppy/strict ambiguity and focus value inheritance in the case of SOEs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> There are a number of proposals (Hobbs and Kehler, 1997; Priist et al., 1994; Asher, 1993; Asher et al., 1997) adopting a similar approach to parallelism and semantics of which the most worked out is undoubtly (Hobbs and Kehler, 1997). (Hobbs and Kehler, 1997) presents a general theory of parallelism and shows that it provides both a fine-grained analysis of the interaction between VP-ellipsis and pronominal anaphora and a general account of sloppy identity. The approach is couched in the &amp;quot;interpretation as abduction framework&amp;quot; and consists in proving by abduction that two properties (i.e.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> sentence or clause meaning) are similar. Because it interleaves a co-recursion on semantic structures with full inferencing (to prove similarity between semantic entities), Hobbs and Kehler's approach is more powerful than the HOU-approach which is based on a strictly syntactic operation (no semantic reasoning occurs). Furthermore, because it can represent coreferences explicitely, it achieves a better account of the interaction between VP-ellipsis and anaphora (in particular, it accounts for the infamous &amp;quot;missing reading puzzles&amp;quot; of ellipsis (Fiengo and May, 1994)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> On the other hand, the equational approach  provided by the HOU-treatment of parallelism naturally supports the interaction of distinct phenomena. We have seen that it correctly captures the interaction of parallelism and focus. Further afield, (Niehren et al., 1997) shows that context unification supports a purely equational treatment of the interaction between ellipsis and quantification whereas (Shieber et al., 1996) presents a very extensive HOU-based treatment of the interaction between scope and ellipsis.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>