Ellipsen

Reich, Ingo

doi:10.1007/978-3-476-04624-6_24

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The extensive literature on this phenomenon has focused on systemic questions like the modeling of the ellipsis site, the relation between the ellipsis site and its antecedent (or postcedent) and the licensing conditions of VP ellipsis (see e.g., Merchant, 2018 ; Reich, 2018 , for recent overviews). Analogously, the psycholinguistic literature mainly addressed procedural aspects of the relation between antecedent and target such as complexity effects (see e.g., Frazier et al, 2000 ; Frazier and Clifton, 2001 ; Apel et al, 2007 ; Martin and McElree, 2008 ; Paape et al, 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of UID for the Usage of Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Psycholinguistic Evidence From Length and Context Effects

et al. 2021

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We investigate the underexplored question of when speakers make use of the omission phenomenon verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English given that the full form is also available to them. We base the interpretation of our results on the well-established information-theoretic Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis: Speakers tend to distribute processing effort uniformly across utterances and avoid regions of low information by omitting redundant material through, e.g., VPE. We investigate the length of the omittable VP and its predictability in context as sources of redundancy which lead to larger or deeper regions of low information and an increased pressure to use ellipsis. We use both naturalness rating and self-paced reading studies in order to link naturalness patterns to potential processing difficulties. For the length effects our rating and reading results support a UID account. Surprisingly, we do not find an effect of the context on the naturalness and the processing of VPE. We suggest that our manipulation might have been too weak or not effective to evidence such an effect.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of UID for the Usage of Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Psycholinguistic Evidence From Length and Context Effects

et al. 2021

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Root participles: directive, commissive, expressive and representative participles in Germanic root configurations

Wegner

2024

J Comp German Linguistics

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The present paper investigates participial root configurations, i.e. participial clauses that are grammatically independent of a host clause. Unlike previous work, which has focussed on either directive or (non-directive) performative uses of so-called past participles (i.e. participles that have passive and/or perfect(ive) interpretations), the present paper establishes a typology of ‘root participles’ in Germanic and contrasts the properties of four main types: (1) directive (RPdir), (2) expressive (RPexp), (3) commissive (RPcom), (4) representative root participles (RPrep). The main claim with respect to the properties of these distinct types is that they differ in terms of whether they include a verbal or an adjectival (passive) participle. In fact, arguments based on argument structure, orientation, aspect, and adverbial modification are presented to substantiate the claim that types (1) and (2) are formed with verbal and types (3) and (4) with adjectival participles. Additionally, the distinct types will be shown to differ in their status of either being non-sentential (i.e. structurally different from potential clausal counterparts) or merely elliptical (just phonologically reduced): types (1) and (3) can be shown to be non-sentential and hence receive a dedicated syntactic analysis, where special attention is paid to the contribution of the (imperative vs. declarative) left periphery.

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Topic drop in German: Empirical support for an information-theoretic account to a long-known omission phenomenon

Schäfer

2021

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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German allows for topic drop (Fries1988), the omission of a preverbal constituent from a V2 sentence. I address the underexplored question of why speakers use topic drop with a corpus study and two acceptability rating studies. I propose an information-theoretic explanation based on the Uniform Information Density hypothesis (Levy and Jaeger2007) that accounts for the full picture of data. The information-theoretic approach predicts that topic drop is more felicitous when the omitted constituent is predictable in context and easy to recover. This leads to a more optimal use of the hearer’s processing capacities. The corpus study on the FraC corpus (Horch and Reich2017) shows that grammatical person, verb probability and verbal inflection impact the frequency of topic drop. The two rating experiments indicate that these differences in frequency are also reflected in acceptability and additionally evidence an impact of topicality on topic drop. Taken together my studies constitute the first systematic empirical investigation of previously only sparsely researched observations from the literature. My information-theoretic account provides a unifying explanation of these isolated observations and is also able to account for the effect of verb probability that I find in my corpus study.

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Ellipsen

Cited by 3 publications

References 30 publications

The Role of UID for the Usage of Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Psycholinguistic Evidence From Length and Context Effects

The Role of UID for the Usage of Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Psycholinguistic Evidence From Length and Context Effects

Root participles: directive, commissive, expressive and representative participles in Germanic root configurations

Topic drop in German: Empirical support for an information-theoretic account to a long-known omission phenomenon

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