Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphosyntactic Mismatch in Gapping

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

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.