Processing gapping: Parallelism and grammatical constraints

Nayoun Kim*, Katy Carlson, Mike Dickey, Masaya Yoshida

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

This study aims to test two hypotheses about the online processing of Gapping: whether the parser inserts an ellipsis site in an incremental fashion in certain coordinated structures (the Incremental Ellipsis Hypothesis), or whether ellipsis is a late and dispreferred option (the Ellipsis as a Last Resort Hypothesis). We employ two offline acceptability rating experiments and a sentence fragment completion experiment to investigate to what extent the distribution of Gapping is controlled by grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints. Furthermore, an eye-tracking while reading experiment demonstrated that the parser inserts an ellipsis site incrementally but only when grammatical and extra-grammatical constraints allow for the insertion of the ellipsis site. This study shows that incremental building of the Gapping structure follows from the parser’s general preference to keep the structure of the two conjuncts maximally parallel in a coordination structure as well as from grammatical restrictions on the distribution of Gapping such as the Coordination Constraint.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)781-798
Number of pages18
JournalQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Volume73
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - May 1 2020

Funding

We thank several anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments. We also thank Shayne Sloggett and Roger Levy for their feedback and helpful comments. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: M.Y. and N.K. would like to thank the NSF DDRI (National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement) for partial financial support under grant number BCS-1749580, and K.C. would like to acknowledge partial financial support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number R15HD072713 and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the NIH under grant number 5P20GM103436-13. M.D.’s contributions to this work were supported with resources and the use of facilities at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. The contents of this article do not represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs of the United States. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: M.Y. and N.K. would like to thank the NSF DDRI (National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement) for partial financial support under grant number BCS-1749580, and K.C. would like to acknowledge partial financial support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number R15HD072713 and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the NIH under grant number 5P20GM103436-13. M.D.’s contributions to this work were supported with resources and the use of facilities at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. The contents of this article do not represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs of the United States.

Keywords

  • Gapping
  • coordination
  • ellipsis
  • grammatical constraint
  • parallelism

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
  • General Psychology
  • Physiology (medical)
  • Physiology

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