Processing elided verb phrases with flawed antecedents: The recycling hypothesis

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Abstract

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g., “Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.”) categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they “undergenerate”); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and explaining the data on verb phrase–ellipsis. Five acceptability judgment experiments supported a “VP recycling hypothesis,” which claims that when a syntactically matching antecedent is not available, the listener/reader creates one using the materials at hand. Experiments 1 and 2 used verb phrase ellipsis sentences with antecedents ranging from perfect (a verb phrase in matrix verb phrase position) to impossible (a verb phrase containing only a deverbal word). Experiments 3 and 4 contrasted antecedents in verbal vs nominal gerund subjects. Experiment 5 explored the possibility that speakers are particularly likely to go beyond the grammar and produce elided constituents without perfect matching antecedents when the antecedent needed is less marked than the antecedent actually produced. This experiment contrasted active (unmarked) and passive antecedents to show that readers seem to honor such a tendency.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

To test the VP recycling hypothesis, 16 sentences like those in (9) were tested in an online acceptability judgment study. Each sentence had four forms.

  • (9)

    a. None of the astronomers saw the comet, /but John did. (Available verb phrase)

b. Seeing the comet was nearly impossible, /but John did. (Embedded verb phrase)

c. The comet was nearly impossible to see, /but John did. (Verb phrase with trace)

d. The comet was nearly unseeable, /but John did. (Negative adjective)

In all forms, the final clause had

Experiment 2

Although we attribute the differences among the four conditions of Experiment 1 [examples (9a)–(9d)] to differences in difficulty of comprehending the ellipsis, it is possible that some or all of the differences are due to differences in difficulty of comprehending the initial (pre-ellipsis) clause itself. Experiment 2 was designed to evaluate this possibility (and to provide a replication of Experiment 1 using a somewhat different technique) by obtaining acceptability judgments of sentences

Experiment 3

To further test the recycling hypothesis, Experiment 3 contrasted antecedents that appear inside verbal vs nominal gerundive subjects. Before turning to the experiment, we discuss the differences between these two structures. Gerunds are noun-like constructions derived from verbs, and exhibit characteristics of both nouns and verbs. They can appear in the syntactic positions normally reserved for nouns. In this experiment, they are subjects, and can take predicates like other noun phrases.

Experiment 4

As in the case of Experiment 1, it is possible that the results of Experiment 3 reflect a difference in the difficulty of comprehending an initial clause with a nominal gerund, rather than the difficulty of comprehending a verbal ellipsis following a nominal gerund. Experiment 4 tests this hypothesis in the same way as Experiment 2 did, by obtaining acceptability ratings for the sentences used in Experiment 3 with and without a final elliptical clause. Experiment 4 also permits another

Experiment 5

We introduce Experiment 5 by discussing when ungrammaticality is relatively acceptable, emphasizing the role of the speaker. We have argued that the grammar of ellipsis requires a syntactically matching antecedent for the elided constituent. This implies that ellipsis is ungrammatical when no syntactically matching antecedent is available, despite the actual occurrence of such examples in naturally-occurring speech (see Kehler, 2002, in particular). If so, then the acceptable examples of

The recycling hypothesis

The central idea behind the recycling hypothesis is that an antecedent verb phrase is copied and, if it is of the wrong shape, it is then altered. The alteration is presumably on a par with reanalysis operations when an unconscious repair of the initial syntactic structure is needed (see Fodor & Ferreira, 1998). The recycling or fixing up of the copied structure should be easy to the extent that the following hold:

  • it involves only a few steps,

  • those steps are defined by the grammar,

  • the copied

Conclusions

Five experiments have been presented that suggest verb phrase ellipsis without a matching antecedent in a standard verb phrase position may be relatively acceptable depending on various characteristics of the example. When a matching verb phrase was available, just not in verb phrase position, then participants judged the ellipsis examples relatively acceptable. When an antecedent was available but needed to be revised, then an intermediate level of acceptability was seen. When there was not

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by Grant HD-18708 to the University of Massachusetts.

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