Morphosyntactic form of Korean fragments is relevant to their resolution

Abstract

We offer evidence for a structural identity constraint between a fragment and the structurally parallel position in the antecedent (which we term correspondent here). We ask if there is a preference for morphosyntactic match (generally in terms of syntactic category, but in terms of case marking in the Korean data discussed here) between a fragment and its correspondent. This question follows from the idea that in order to interpret fragments, the parser directly accesses content-addressable representations stored in memory, using as retrieval cues the linguistic information that fragments provide. We explore this preference using experimental data from Korean. In three acceptability judgment experiments, we demonstrate that (1) morphosyntactic match between fragments and correspondents is favored over mismatch, (2) the acceptability of mismatch is directional, favoring fragments that are morphosyntactically less complex than correspondents over the reverse, and (3) caseless fragments are degraded when paired with implicit correspondents compared to explicit ones.

Fragments and structural identity on a direct interpretation approach

“…In examples like (45A), the fragments’ correlate ( mwues-ul ‘what- acc ’) can undergo case ellipsis such that it is realized as the caseless NP mwues. The most acceptable way to combine the fragment and the correlate is by matching their structural case features by making the fragment caseless as well (Nykiel et al 2018) (this result resembles the matching effects we discussed in Section 3.2).…”

“…While it is clear that the kind of P-drop discussed in this section is specific to anaphora, there is evidence that although Korean case drop is not, it behaves differently in anaphoric contexts than in non-anaphoric ones. Nykiel et al (2018) demonstrated experimentally that semantic case markers may be dropped from Korean merger-type fragments, as in (44).Ratings for caseless fragments trended in the direction of lower acceptability than ratings for case-marked fragments, although this difference failed to reach statistical significance. Nykiel et al (2018) obtained similar results for Korean structural case markers.…”

“…Nykiel et al (2018) demonstrated experimentally that semantic case markers may be dropped from Korean merger-type fragments, as in (44).Ratings for caseless fragments trended in the direction of lower acceptability than ratings for case-marked fragments, although this difference failed to reach statistical significance. Nykiel et al (2018) obtained similar results for Korean structural case markers. The fragment in (45) may be realized as either an accusative-marked NP or a caseless NP, with no reliable acceptability difference between the two options.There is one configuration in which minimal (caseless) fragments are better than larger ones.…”

“…As for Korean, Nykiel et al (2018) reported, as expected, severely degraded acceptability ratings for caseless sprouting fragments like (18B′), and this also applies to omission of structural case markers, as seen in the degraded caseless fragment corresponding to an implicit accusative-marked NP in (21B′).Korean sprouting fragments thus constitute a further robust argument for requiring morphosyntactic identity between them and their correlates in the event that the correlates are members of the argument structure of some lexical head in the antecedent.…”