Abstract

Previous studies have shown that English speakers use a range of factors including locality, information structure, and semantic parallelism to interpret clausal ellipsis structures. Yet, the relative importance of each factor is currently underexplored. As cues to information structure and semantic parallelism are often implicit in English, we turned to Persian which marks information structure overtly via word order scrambling and uses the -rā morpheme to indicate definiteness/specificity on direct objects. To determine what strategies Persian speakers use to disambiguate clausal ellipsis, we conducted a naturalness rating study and sentence completion task on polarity stripping structures. Our results show that information structure and parallelism strongly influence correlate resolution in both tasks, but that a weaker preference for a local correlate emerges in scrambling in the sentence completion task. As these results diverge from those obtained in English studies, we speculate that the morphosyntactic properties of Persian constrain the strategies the processer uses in selecting a contrastive correlate and resolving ambiguity in stripping ellipsis.

Highlights

  • Ellipsis refers to a well-studied phenomenon in which one or more elements are elided from the sentence, but contribute to sentence meaning

  • The central questions that are addressed in this paper are as follows: Does Persian exhibit a general preference for Locality or Morphological Parallelism in the resolution of ambiguous stripping structures? When these two principles are placed in conflict, which one determines how the structure will be interpreted? In two experimental studies, we study how Locality and Parallelism interact and which, if either, Persian speakers prioritize in offline language comprehension

  • The patterns observed in the interpretation question results support the claim that Morphological Parallelism plays a crucial role in remnant-correlate pairing when resolving stripping ellipsis in Persian

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Summary

Introduction

Ellipsis refers to a well-studied phenomenon in which one or more elements are elided from the sentence, but contribute to sentence meaning. While the exact licensing conditions for ellipsis are still under debate (see Merchant 2019 for discussion and references), ellipsis generally requires a salient linguistic antecedent which can be recovered from the context (Hankamer & Sag 1976). Ellipsis takes many forms, we focus here on cases of clausal ellipsis known as stripping (Ross 1969; Hankamer & Sag 1976), sometimes called bare argument ellipsis (1).. In the case of (1a), the remnant (a magazine) is interpreted with respect to the elided content D,2 along the lines of (1b), contrasting with the correlate (a book) in the antecedent clause. (1). A. Mary bought [Correlate a book], (but) not [Remnant a magazine] D. b. Mary bought a book, (but) she did not buy a magazine

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