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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.1016-1032
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 03 Sep 2022 Revised 24 Sep 2022 Accepted 30 Sep 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202210.1016

Information Structure and Voice Mismatch in VP Ellipsis

Hae-Kyung Wee
Professor, Dept. of British and American Humanities, Dankook University 152 Jukjeon-ro, Suji-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea, Tel: 031) 8005-2114 hkwee@dankook.ac.kr


© 2022 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 explores Korean and English voice mismatch effect in Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and analyzes them based on Kertz’s (2013) information structural (IS) account. Kertz’s account for varying judgements on acceptability of voice mismatched VPE in English is that a voice mismatched VPE is judged unacceptable when the subject, the default topic, of the VPE clause is not in a well-formed contrastive topic (CT) relation with that of the antecedent clause. We test the validity of Kertz’s CT-based IS account for Korean mismatched VPE and additionally investigate whether another informational category, contrastive focus (CF) plays a role for voice mismatch effect in Korean. We found that (i) the judgement difference between the acceptability of ill-formed CT-relations and that of non-CT relations is relatively small in Korean, compared to English cases; (ii) even non-CT relation cases are not judged perfectly grammatical, which suggests that mismatch cases yield a certain degree of grammatical degradation regardless of the status of the information structure; (iv) nonetheless, in general, Kertz’s CT-based IS account is also valid for Korean voice-mismatched VPE; and (iv) finally, what affects the acceptability of the voice mismatched VPE the most in Korean is non-parallelism between the topic-comment structures resulting from an ill-formed CT relation, but not any other IS non-parallelism such as a non-parallel contrastive focus relation.

Keywords:

voice mismatch, VP ellipsis, information structure, contrastive topic, contrastive focus, t opic, focus, parallelism

Acknowledgments

I appreciate valuable comments of anonymous reviewers. All the errors and fallacies are my own.

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