Clausal Ellipsis, Its Structure and Online Processing

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The purpose of this project is to investigate the structure of ellipsis from the point of view of theoretical syntax and online sentence processing. Specifically, the project emphasizes the view that a detailed study in the theoretical syntax of ellipsis provides invaluable insight into the mechanism of the structure building process in online sentence processing. The particular type of ellipsis that will be examined in this project is known as 'sluicing' (e.g., "John said Mary was reading in the garden, but he didn't say what").Previous studies of ellipsis have used sluicing as an argument against the position that the grammar supports the unpronounced abstract syntactic structure. (e.g., because sluicing does not always respect syntactic island constraints). Dr. Yoshida will investigate whether ellipsis sites in sluicing are associated with a full-fledged syntactic structure and, if so, what the syntactic properties of those sites are. In addition, the experimental studies of how sluicing constructions are processed on line will investigate: (i) When the parser identifies the ellipsis; (ii) What representation the parser builds in the ellipsis site during online processing; and (iii) What constraint the online structure building process obeys.In addition to advancing our understanding of the syntax of natural language and how humans identify and process the structure of sentences in the course of language comprehension, this project will also provide valuable training opportunities for graduate students in linguistics and psycholinguistics.