Case-matching effects under clausal ellipsis and the cue-based theory of sentence processing

Abstract

This paper is concerned with case-matching effects under clausal ellipsis. We begin by considering available crosslinguistic data that indicate that variation in case marking on a fragment is delimited by the argument structure of the lexical head that assigns case to the fragment’s correlate in the antecedent clause. We then offer experimental evidence for a case-matching preference in Korean when a fragment and its correlate may differ in case marking. This case-matching preference corresponds to a known case of mandatory case-matching in Hungarian, but their relationship is not predicted by any of the existing syntactic accounts of case-matching effects under clausal ellipsis. We propose a novel perspective on fragments that derives case-matching effects, including optional and mandatory case matching, from the predictions of cue-based retrieval. Two further acceptability judgment studies are offered in support of our proposal.

Elliptical Responses to Direct and Indirect Requests for Information

“…Participant: We close at nine.). Further evidence for the role of accessibility in the production of ellipsis comes from Lemke et al (2022), Nykiel (2015Nykiel ( , 2017, and Nykiel et al (2022). Using a combination of experiment-based and corpus methods, these studies suggest that both the rate of ellipsis production and the form of the ellipsis itself (e.g., do elliptical responses such as those reported by Levelt and Kelter, 1982, use a preposition or not?)…”

“…1.2 Prior studies: Clark (1979) and Levelt and Kelter (1982) The RAMP framework is supported by theoretical and empirical work in linguistics and psycholinguistics (e.g., Hankamer & Sag, 1976;Levelt & Kelter, 1982;Nykiel & Hawkins, 2020;Schäfer et al, 2021). Much of the empirical support for the RAMP principles come from language comprehension experiments (e.g., Martin & McElree, 2011), rating studies (e.g., Nykiel et al, 2022;Schäfer et al, 2021), and corpus analyses (e.g., Nykiel, 2015Nykiel, , 2017Nykiel & Hawkins, 2020), though there have been a smaller number of experiments eliciting production of elliptical forms (e.g., Lemke et al, 2022). This previous work has value in illuminating the constraints involved in the use of ellipsis.…”