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Article published In:
Concentric
Vol. 49:1 (2023) ► pp.70–95

An experimental investigation of P/Case‑drop in Korean gapping

ORCID logo | Korea University

This study examines two syntactic analyses of P/Case-drop in Korean gapping (aka right-node-raising or right-peripheral ellipsis): LF copying (Abe & Hoshi 1997) and PF deletion (Kim 1997). We employ two online acceptability rating experiments to investigate to what extent the distribution of P/Case-drop is controlled by grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints. The experimental findings suggest that (a) linear non-parallelism elicits a processing cost for gapping and (b) P/Case-drop is a costly operation, which results in higher frequencies of PP fragments (in relation to NP fragments) and Case-marked NP fragments (in relation to Case-less NP fragments). We argue that the parallelism effect follows from the parser’s general preference to keep the structure of each conjunct maximally parallel in a coordination structure (Kim et al. 2020). Given this, we conclude that P/Case-drop phenomena in Korean gapping are better explained by a PF deletion analysis, supplemented with extra deletion (An 2016, 2019; Erschler 2022) and ellipsis parallelism (Frazier, Munn & Clifton 2000; Kehler 2000; Frazier & Clifton 2001; Carlson 2002), rather than by an LF copying analysis.

Keywords: ellipsis parallelism, extra deletion, gapping, P/Case-drop, processing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Ellipsis approach to Korean/Japanese gapping
    • 2.1LF copying analysis
    • 2.2PF deletion analysis
    • 2.3Processing of parallelism and P/Case-drop in gapping
  • 3.Experiments
    • 3.1Experiment 1
      • 3.1.1Participants, materials, and design
      • 3.1.2Procedure
      • 3.1.3Data analysis
      • 3.1.4Results and discussion
    • 3.2Experiment 2
      • 3.2.1Participants, materials, and design
      • 3.2.2Results and discussion
  • 4.General discussion and analysis of P/Case-drop
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 25 May 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.22038.kim
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