A discourse-based approach to concessive although-stripping in English

Abstract

This study investigates concessive stripping in English, a phenomenon where the so-called Stripping or Bare Argument Ellipsis (BAE) occurs in although-clauses. This elliptical construction has at least two sub-patterns: although-stripping and negative although-stripping. Merchant (2003) and Wurmbrand (2017) argue that although-stripping undergoes clausal ellipsis to contribute to the propositional meaning of a remnant, supported by syntactic connectivity effects. However, the corpus data we have identified indicate that connectivity effects can often be overridden. Based on this observation, we suggest a discourse-based approach in which the ellipsis construction is directly generated with no derivational processes and interpreted with reference to the contextual information in question