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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.277-288
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 05 Jan 2025 Revised 24 Jan 2025 Accepted 10 Feb 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202502.277

Grammaticality Illusions in the Real-Time Processing of Backward Noun Phrase Ellipsis

Younseo Ha ; Michale Frazier ; Nayoun Kim
(First author) Master’s student, Department of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University
(Co-author) Postdoctoral Researcher, Institution for Linguistics, Leipzig University
(Corresponding author) Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study investigated the processing of backward Noun Phrase Ellipsis (NPE), as it provides an interesting staging ground for the question of what kind of content in the antecedent is recovered at the NPE-site (Kim 2019, Kim et al 2019, Kim and Yoshida submitted) where the ellipsis-site occurs prior to the antecedent. Building on previous findings on the illusion of grammaticality in non-elliptical constructions (Wagers et al. 2009) and NPE-contexts (Kim 2019, Kim et al. 2019, Kim and Frazier 2022), we examined whether similar patterns emerge in the context of backward NPE. If the agreement attraction effect and similar grammatical asymmetries arise in backward NPE, this could serve as an argument against simple memory retrieval models of agreement attraction that do not take structural information into account (c.f. Martin and McElree 2008, 2009, 2011). Our results indicate that an illusion of grammaticality is present even during real-time processing of backward NPE, suggesting that structural information, alongside morphological and semantic content, is retrieved when resolving the ellipsis (Kim 2019, Kim et al. 2019, Kim et al. 2020, Lago et al. 2015, Tanner et al. 2014, Wagers et al. 2009). Furthermore, we observed an agreement attraction effect in ungrammatical conditions with no effect in grammatical conditions (Wagers et al. 2009), which is in line with the hypothesis that the reader participates in an active and sustained search for the antecedent even when the first attempt to recover the NPE-site fails–in this case, owing to incongruence in features between the head noun and the verb with respect to number (Kim 2019, Kim et al. 2019)–resembling the patterns observed in resolving cataphoric dependencies (Giskes and Kush 2021, Kazanina et al. 2007).

Keywords:

backward noun phrase ellipsis, structural information, real-time processing, cue-based retrieval mechanism

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2023S1A5A8079483).

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