Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphosyntactic Mismatch in Gapping

我们对人类如何理解句子的理解不仅要包含句子中明确表达的内容，还要包含省略的内容，如省略的例子。 这个研究项目调查了人们如何在心理上处理省略句，在省略句中，句子意义的某些元素在句子的口语或书面形式中没有明显的表现。具体来说，这个项目的重点是实时理解一个特定的椭圆形建设称为间隙。“Joan ordered coleslaw，and Peter，potato salad”（琼点了凉拌卷心菜，彼得点了土豆沙拉）是一种省略，其中一个动词不见了，在它的前面和后面都留下了一些东西。当语言使用者遇到“Gapping”结构时，她必须从前面的从句中返回已经处理过的词，并确定那些词来填补“Gapped”从句中的空白。在吉田马萨亚博士的指导下，迈克尔·弗雷泽将进行一系列实验，以研究这种检索过程是如何发生的：它在句子的显性形式中引用了什么线索，以及这种结构的听者或读者如何使用语法知识的不同方面来检索已经处理过的单词以“填补空白”由于省略句的解释依赖于听者对句子中被省略部分的解释能力，因此它们是测试语法在理解中的作用的理想场所。人们如何理解它们可以用来作为一个探针，以调查语言系统的不同方面之间的关系，一种语言的语法的静态知识系统，以及用于把单词组合成短语和从句的实时过程。

Our understanding of how humans interpret sentences must accommodate not just the content that finds explicit expression in sentences, but also that content that is omitted, as is seen in instances of ellipsis. This research project investigates how people mentally process elliptical sentences, sentences in which some element of the sentence's meaning is not overtly represented in the spoken or written form of the sentence. Specifically, this project focuses upon the real-time comprehension of one particular elliptical construction called Gapping. Gapping is the kind of ellipsis illustrated in "Joan ordered coleslaw, and Peter, potato salad," where a verb has gone missing, leaving something behind both before and after it.When a language user encounters a Gapping construction, she must refer back to already processed words from the preceding clause and identify those with which to fill the blank in the Gapped clause. Under the direction of Dr. Masaya Yoshida, Michael Frazier will carry out a series of experiments to examines how this process of retrieval occurs: what clues it makes reference to in the overt form of the sentence, and how the listener or reader of such a construction uses different aspects of grammatical knowledge to retrieve already-processed words to "fill the blank" at the ellipsis site.Because elliptical sentences rely for their interpretation on listeners' ability to deduce an interpretation for parts of the sentence that have been omitted, they are an ideal testing ground for the role of the grammar in comprehension. How people understand them can be used as a probe for investigating the relation between different aspects of the language system, the static knowledge system of a language's grammar, and the real-time processes used to put words together into phrases and clauses as they are encountered.