An experimental approach to parallelism in ellipsis

Abstract

The present study investigates parallelism constraints in Romance gapping with pro-drop. We provide empirical evidence from two acceptability judgment tasks in Romanian and Spanish, that syntactic parallelism in gapping is less strict than traditionally assumed. Parallelism constraints are stronger at the discourse and information structure levels than at the syntactic level. Our experimental findings show that gapping with pro-drop is as acceptable as without pro-drop, challenging the double foci analysis and supporting the topic-focus pattern for gapping constructions. At the semantic level, our data show that the contrast in gapping is not always established explicitly; more generally, they show that one cannot make a correlation between contrast and subject (null vs overt) expression in Romance.

Information structural effects in processing contrastive ellipsis: Eye-tracking evidence from a flexible word order language

“…Namely, Locality effects in online processing do not disappear when the case of the remnant matches a unique correlate candidate in the antecedent clause, as evidenced by subject penalties following canonical V2 clauses in both reading time and regression measures. The present findings are compatible with information-structural parallelism between the remnant and correlate being weighted more heavily than case parallelism (see also Frazier & Clifton 2005 and Bîlbîie & De La Fuente 2021), although further work teasing these two factors apart is needed for more direct evidence for this proposal.…”

“…Winkler 2005, for a theoretical discussion). Relatedly, in support of the importance of information-structural parallelism in particular, Bîlbîie & De La Fuente (2021) show that parallelism constraints on gapping are stronger at the discourse level than at the syntactic level.…”

“…Harris & Carlson 2016, 2018) rather than processing difficulties associated with a disambiguated subject or object remnant interpretation. The Recency and Information Structure hypotheses assume that the processor consults case information during the pairing of the remnant and the correlate, but the relative weighting of case parallelism and information-structural parallelism, particularly in incremental processing, is an open question (see Frazier & Clifton 2005 and Bîlbîie & De La Fuente 2021, for work looking at syntactic and discourse parallelism effects on clausal ellipsis).…”