Case-matching effects under clausal ellipsis and the cue-based theory of sentence processing

Abstract

This paper is concerned with case-matching effects under clausal ellipsis. We begin by considering available crosslinguistic data that indicate that variation in case marking on a fragment is delimited by the argument structure of the lexical head that assigns case to the fragment’s correlate in the antecedent clause. We then offer experimental evidence for a case-matching preference in Korean when a fragment and its correlate may differ in case marking. This case-matching preference corresponds to a known case of mandatory case-matching in Hungarian, but their relationship is not predicted by any of the existing syntactic accounts of case-matching effects under clausal ellipsis. We propose a novel perspective on fragments that derives case-matching effects, including optional and mandatory case matching, from the predictions of cue-based retrieval. Two further acceptability judgment studies are offered in support of our proposal.