1 Coherence Relations, Ellipsis, and Contrastive Topics 1 Petra Hendriks Centre for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen (P.Hendriks@let.rug.nl) 1. The puzzle A highly pervasive phenomenon in natural languages is ellipsis. It is commonly believed that the presence of ellipsis is one of the main reasons why natural language is as ambiguous as it is. If lexical material is left unpronounced, a hearer must rely on other parts of the sentence, on contextual information and on intonation to recover the unpronounced material. Because there may be different options within the sentence for recovery of unpronounced material, elliptical sentences can be ambiguous. Also, the context in which the sentence appears can differ, which may lead to different readings. Finally, the sentence may be compatible with different patterns of intonation. Because intonation can have truth-conditional effects, this may also increase the number of readings of a sentence. In a number of cases, however, ellipsis decreases rather than increases the number of readings of a sentence. Consider the following sentences from Levin and Prince (1986): (1) Sue became upset and Nan became downright angry. (2) Sue became upset and Nan Ø downright angry. Sentence (1) has two readings, a symmetric and an asymmetric reading. According to the symmetric reading, the two events expressed by the two conjuncts are understood as independent. According to the other reading, the asymmetric reading, the first event is interpreted as the cause of the second event. In contrast to (1), the gapped sentence in (2) only has the symmetric reading. 1 I would like to thank Gerlof Bouma, Jennifer Spenader, Niina Zhang, Jan-Wouter Zwart, the audience of the PIONIER Workshop on Contrast in Discourse, April 2003, in Nijmegen, the audience of the TABU-dag, June 2003, in Groningen, and two reviewers for this journal for their comments. I gratefully acknowledge the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO (grants no. 051.02.070 and 015.001.103).