Previous experimental work on the processing of clausal ellipsis with contrastive remnants shows a Locality preference – DP remnants are preferentially paired with the most recently encountered DP correlate in the antecedent clause, even in the presence of contrastive prosody or semantic bias favouring a non-local correlate. The Locality effect has been argued to arise from the language processor consulting (default) information-structural representations when pairing remnants and correlates, yet direct evidence for the information structure hypothesis for Locality has been difficult to obtain. Estonian is a flexible word order language that optionally marks Contrastive Topics (CTs) syntactically, while allowing for the linear distance between a CT subject correlate and remnant to be held constant, in order to rule out a Recency explanation for the Locality effect. In an eye-tracking during reading experiment with case-disambiguated subject and object remnants in Estonian, we see asymmetries in the Locality preference (i.e. object advantage) following canonical Verb-second antecedent clauses and subject CT-marking Verb-third clauses. This provides novel evidence for fine-grained information-structural representations guiding the processing of contrastive ellipsis.
The phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement (CCA) has been documented cross-linguistically in conjunctions (“X and Y”) and disjunctions (“(either) X or Y”), and agreement patterns with feature-mismatching coordination have been shown to be variable, both across constructions and speakers. The present work addresses agreement patterns with replacives subjects (“not X but Y”) in Estonian, where subjects can occur pre- or postverbally. Replacives differ from other forms of coordination by having a single asserted subject. A series of two speeded acceptability experiments with postverbal subject replacives, and a relative naturalness rating experiment comparing replacives to disjunctions showed that both CCA and a bias towards agreeing with the asserted subject (ASA) play a role in determiningverbal agreement with replacive subjects. Additionally, there is evidence for less featurally marked 3rd person verb forms being preferred, particularly when there are conflicting pressures on agreement from CCA and ASA, and for person mismatches being fully repaired by morphological syncretism.
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