Ellipsis and information structure: Evidence from Romanian gapping

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the information structure of gapping, a linguistic level which has been much less studied than syntax or semantics. Romanian is a good test case for such a study, since it displays a specific contrastive conjunction iar, which occurs frequently with gapping and which severely restricts the information structure ordering. We explain its high frequency with ellipsis by the fact that it shares several crucial constraints with gapping. Our data show that the contrastive pairs with iar do not have the same contribution: one pair contains contrastive topics, and the other foci. However, the order of the correlates in the source clause does not necessarily match the order of the remnants in the gapped clause. We use a QUD model, based on question-answer congruence, which is very useful for a careful investigation of the discourse and information structure of ellipsis.

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 andBîlbîie &De La Fuente 2021), although further work teasing these two factors apart is needed for more direct evidence for this proposal.…”

“…This is compatible with the processor making fine-grained distinctions between CTs and CFs during comprehension, as CTs are not primary carriers of Focus. A similar effect would be expected to occur in other languages distinguishing between CT and CF remnant ellipsis (Konietzko & Winkler 2010, Rasekhi 2018, Bîlbîie 2019). English, however, has not been shown to have this distinction and previous work on contrastive ellipsis explicitly or implicitly assumes that remnants are Foci (see, e.g.…”

“…Estonian distinguishes between CT and CF remnant ellipsis, like German (Konietzko & Winkler 2010), Persian (Rasekhi 2018) and Romanian (Bîlbîie 2019). I propose the structures shown in Example (13) for contrastive ellipsis in Estonian.…”