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Imperfect ellipsis: Antecedents beyond syntax?

Charles Clifton¹, Lyn Frazier

¹University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Syntax (Oxford, England)

|March 29, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

This study reveals how readers process verb phrase ellipsis, favoring main assertions in conditional sentences. Redundant antecedents and counterfactuals influence antecedent choice, impacting ellipsis acceptability.

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Area of Science:

Linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Computational Linguistics

Background:

Ellipsis, the omission of words recoverable from context, is governed by syntactic and discourse factors.
The study focuses on discourse conditions, specifically the tendency to favor antecedents within the main assertion of an utterance.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the discourse condition favoring main assertion antecedents for verb phrase ellipsis (VPE).
To determine if this main assertion tendency is a grammatical rule or a processing phenomenon.
To examine how conditional antecedents and counterfactuals affect VPE resolution.

Main Methods:

Two experiments were conducted using verb phrase ellipsis examples with antecedents embedded within conditional clauses.
Experiment 1 tested the influence of the main assertion tendency on the choice between full conditional and verb phrase antecedents.
Experiment 2 examined the effect of counterfactual modals within the conditional antecedent on ellipsis acceptability.

Main Results:

Readers consider full conditional antecedents due to the main assertion tendency, not just verb phrase antecedents.
When conditional antecedents are redundant, readers favor fewer full conditional antecedents for VPE.
Adding a counterfactual modal to the conditional antecedent improves the acceptability of flawed or imperfect ellipsis.

Conclusions:

The main assertion tendency in ellipsis resolution is best explained as a processor-based phenomenon rather than a strict grammatical rule.
Redundancy and counterfactuality in conditional antecedents significantly modulate the processing and acceptability of verb phrase ellipsis.
The findings contribute to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension and ellipsis resolution.