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Remnant connectivity in pseudogapping: Experimental evidence for a direct generation approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2022

TILL POPPELS  and
PHILIP MILLER
TILL POPPELS
Affiliation:
Université Paris Cité, UMR 7110 LLF, Bât. Olympe de Gouges, 5ème étage. 8, Rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris, France tillpoppels@gmail.com
PHILIP MILLER
Affiliation:
Université Paris Cité, EA3697 CLILLAC-ARP, Bât. Olympe de Gouges, 5ème étage. 8, Rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris, France philip.miller@u-paris.fr
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Abstract

This paper reports the results of two acceptability judgment experiments that examine the effect of PP remnants with mismatching correlates in the antecedent clause (either a PP, with a distinct preposition, or an NP) on the acceptability of pseudogapping as well as non-elliptical controls. Across both experiments, three novel findings emerge: First, utterances with mismatching PPs across the ellipsis clause and its antecedent were consistently degraded relative to their preposition-matched counterparts. Second, this mismatch penalty arose for elliptical and non-elliptical variants alike with only minor differences between the two. Finally, a significant portion of the mismatch penalties was explained away by the degree of semantic similarity between the thematic relations established by the mismatching prepositions with respect to the antecedent verb which was measured in a separate norming experiment. We examine the consequences of these new empirical results for current theories of pseudogapping, namely (i) the remnant-raising analysis, according to which the remnant XP is raised leftward out of the VP prior to VP ellipsis, licensed under identity with its antecedent; and (ii) the direct generation analysis, under which auxiliaries are verbal proforms that recover their referent anaphorically without the need for remnant movement or syntactic identity between the verb and its antecedent. We conclude that the data are more naturally accounted for under the direct generation approach.

Keywords

acceptability judgment experimentsanaphoraellipsismismatched antecedentspseudogapping
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 59 , Special Issue 2: Experimental and corpus-based approaches to ellipsis , April 2023 , pp. 293 - 325
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Barbara Hemforth for conducting initial rounds of data collection and analysis of Experiments 1 and 2. We would further like to thank the audiences at ECBAE 2019, Linguistic Evidence 2020, and CUNY 2020 for providing feedback on earlier versions of the paper, as well as three anonymous reviewers and the volume editors for their comments and suggestions. This work is supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université Paris Cité – ANR-18-IDEX-0001.

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