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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 23, No. 0, pp.1014-1035
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Jan 2023
Received 21 Sep 2023 Revised 04 Nov 2023 Accepted 15 Nov 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.23..202311.1014

Focus Structure and Voice Mismatch in Pseudogapping

Jungsoo Kim ; Sang-Hee Park
(first author) Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Language Education, Incheon National University. jungsookim@inu.ac.kr
(corresponding author) Assistant Professor, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Hanbat National University. sangheepark@hanbat.ac.kr


© 2023 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 paper explores the identity, or mismatch, of voice in a particular type of ellipsis called pseudogapping (e.g., John called Sarah, and Mary will Jane). Although voice is ipso facto a grammatical category, it is known to interact with information structure to affect speakers’ perception of it. In three acceptability judgment tasks, we tested how native speakers evaluate voice mismatches in pseudogapping, in comparison to verb phrase ellipsis, and also whether their judgments are affected by the locus of the main contrast or focus—i.e., contrastive topics or auxiliary focus. Unlike previous findings which showed that information structure can modulate how speakers perceive mismatches in verb phrase ellipsis (Kertz 2013), we found no reliable effect of information structure on pseudogapping. This suggests that the impact of focus structure may not be the same across all ellipsis types. We discuss the broader implications of the results from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.

Keywords:

pseudogapping, ellipsis, voice mismatch, information structure, acceptability judgment

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