The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics

Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22
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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp. 675-694
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Received 25 May 2022 Revised 10 Jul 2022 Accepted 30 Jul 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202207.675

English Pseudogapping: An Experimental Perspective
Jungsoo Kim ; Sang-Hee Park
(first author) Lecturer, Dept. of English Linguistics and Literature, Kyung Hee Univ. (jungsookim@khu.ac.kr)
(corresponding author) Research Assistant Professor, Cha Mirisa College of Liberal Arts, Duksung Women’s Univ. (sangheepark@duksung.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

The relationship between a construction’s frequency of use and its acceptability is a complex issue (Featherston 2005, Lau et al. 2017). Researchers proposed that there is a tight connection between the corpus frequency and acceptability of pseudogapping, e.g., That music pleased Tim, but it didn’t me. Corpus studies found extremely high proportions of comparative conjunctions (as opposed to coordinate conjunctions like and and but) and pronominal subjects in the pseudogapped (PG)-clauses that are intended to co-refer with the subjects in the antecedent clauses (Hoeksema 2006, Levin 1980, Miller 2014). In this context, this study investigated the effects of (i) connective type (comparative or coordinate) and (ii) the pronominality of subjects in PG-clauses on acceptability ratings by native English speakers. Results showed that comparative pseudogapping received significantly higher ratings than coordinate pseudogapping, but the ratings for the latter were still in the acceptable range, i.e., around the median of a 7-point scale. Ratings on pronominal vs. proper name subjects in PG-clauses were more complicated than what previous studies suggested based on corpus findings and introspective judgments. In particular, a three-way difference was found between comparative, and-, and but-structures, showing that effects of subject pronominality crucially depend on the nature of the co-occurring connective. Overall, the present study provides experimental data for further research on ellipsis and offers a more fine-grained understanding of how different factors interact in the perception of pseudogapping sentences.

Keywords: pseudogapping, ellipsis, acceptability judgment, frequency, contrast
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