Clefting, Parallelism, and Focus in Ellipsis Sentences

Carlson, Katy

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-12961-7_4

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Even without overt focus marking, similar sentences might be swayed toward contrastive or concessive uses by a surrounding context, illustrating the flexibility (or not) of the conjunction but . It would be interesting also to examine the use of sentences with negative replacive or stripping ellipsis in corpora to see whether the object bias seen here in completions and in ellipsis comprehension research (e.g., Carlson, 2013, in press) would be evident in natural language use. Similarly, corpus research on the frequency of use of but in sentences with different discourse patterns could help decide whether the preference for non-contrast uses seen here holds more generally.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The subjects and objects in each clause were human definite descriptions, usually occupations. The sentences were partly modeled on items in Stolterfoht et al.’s (2007) German ERP studies, and completed bare argument ellipsis versions of these sentences were studied in Carlson (2002, 2013, in press). …”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since this was a written study, prosodic markers were not available, though an auditory completion study could have used accents for the same purpose. It is likely that syntactic clefting would have a similar effect to only , since comprehension research on related ellipsis sentences with clefts (Carlson, in press) shows that they are effective in drawing the ellipsis remnant to contrast with the clefted item. It is also true that even in sentences with no contrastive focus marker, the first clause still has a focus (like any sentence in the language).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Predicting contrast in sentences with and without focus marking

Carlson

2014

Lingua

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How do we know when a contrast is coming? This study explores the prediction of parallel contrastive phrases, especially NPs, in sentences with and without overt focus marking. A written sentence-completion questionnaire with clauses followed by the conjunction “but” compared unmarked initial clauses to ones with the focus marker “only” on the subject or object. Both conditions with “only” elicited more contrasts overall than the condition without focus marking, and many of the contrasts were with the focus-marked NP. While the baseline (no-only) condition had full clauses for half of the completions, subject focus increased clausal completions and object focus increased negative ellipsis completions (“not”+NP structures), both changes in syntax which make a contrast with the marked NP easy. The production of negative ellipsis sentences primarily in the object-focus condition suggests that the object bias of these sentences in comprehension could relate to their being used more frequently with this meaning. Finally, the overall pattern of results shows that overt marking of contrastive focus increases continuations with contrasts, and the conjunction “but” does not reliably predict explicitly-stated contrasts within a sentence without overt focus marking.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Predicting contrast in sentences with and without focus marking

Carlson

2014

Lingua

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“… [12] An anonymous referee points out that while the preference for case matching is compatible with cue-based retrieval, it is just as compatible with syntactic priming effects (Bock 1986; Pickering & Branigan 1998; Branigan, Pickering & Cleland 2000; Sturt, Keller & Dubey 2010) and structural parallelism effects, which arise in ellipsis (Carlson 2002; Nykiel 2017; Kim & Runner 2018; Parker 2018; Harris & Carlson 2019; Nykiel & Hawkins 2020) and outside of it (Frazier et al 1984; Dubey, Sturt & Keller 2005; Callahan, Shapiro & Love 2010). We concede that a case-matching preference alone constitutes insufficient evidence to distinguish between these accounts.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Nykiel¹,

Kim²,

Sim³

2022

J. Ling.

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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.

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“…Firstly, Sturt et al (2004) claimed that comprehenders processed focused information more deeply than they did backgrounded information. Anaphor integration (Sanford et al, 2009;Klin et al, 2004), attachment placement (Carlson et al, 2009;Carlson andPotter, 2021, 2022), or ellipsis (Carlson, 2015) processing have all been shown to be influenced by focus.…”

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confidence: 99%

"Czech" the Alternatives: A Probe Recognition Study of Focus and Word Order

Lacina¹,

Šimík²,

Gotzner³

2022

Preprint

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Comprehenders have been found to activate, select, and represent plausible alternatives to focused elements when processing incoming sentences (see Gotzner & Spalek, 2019 for an overview). This is consistent with Rooth’s (1992) theory of focus interpretation, which claims that the function of focus is to create an additional level of meaning consisting of a set of propositions derived by replacing the focused element with its contextually appropriate alternatives of the same semantic type. However, the psycholinguistic research on the processing of focus has mostly been done on a small sample of Germanic languages which mostly use prosody to mark focus. We tested whether the current results generalise to Czech, which can use word order to mark narrow focus. We report on a probe recognition study aiming to test whether Czech comprehenders represent alternatives to focused subjects. The results provide preliminary evidence in favour of this claim.

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Clefting, Parallelism, and Focus in Ellipsis Sentences

Cited by 8 publications

References 45 publications

Predicting contrast in sentences with and without focus marking

Predicting contrast in sentences with and without focus marking

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

"Czech" the Alternatives: A Probe Recognition Study of Focus and Word Order

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