Clifton Charles, Xiang Ming, Frazier Lyn
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 135 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA.
Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL60637, USA.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2019 Aug;48(4):877-887. doi: 10.1007/s10936-019-09636-z.
Theories of ellipsis differ in the identity condition claimed to hold between an antecedent and an elided constituent. A syntactic identity condition leads to the prediction that syntactic mismatches between an antecedent and elided constituent should give rise to a penalty, and that penalty should be greater than in corresponding examples without ellipsis. Further, if syntactic mismatches are ungrammatical, violating the syntactic identity condition, then in effect they are speech errors and would be expected to be rated higher when a passive clause antecedes an active elided VP than vice versa because people misremember passives as actives more often the reverse. A written acceptability judgment study crossed the voice of the antecedent clause (active/passive), the voice of the ellipsis clause (active/passive) and ellipsis/non-ellipsis in the final clause. Results indicate a syntactic mismatch lowers acceptability in examples with elided VPs but not examples with overt VPs, as predicted by theories with a syntactic identity condition. Passive-active mismatches were rated better than active-passive ones, especially with ellipsis, as predicted by a speech error/repair approach to mismatches. This result eliminates any concern that the appearance of a voice asymmetry might only be due to some incompatibility between VP ellipsis and passive voice.
省略理论在先行词与省略成分之间所主张的同一性条件方面存在差异。句法同一性条件导致这样的预测：先行词与省略成分之间的句法不匹配应该会导致一种惩罚，并且这种惩罚应该比在没有省略的相应例子中更大。此外，如果句法不匹配是不符合语法规则的，违反了句法同一性条件，那么实际上它们就是言语错误，并且当一个被动从句先于一个主动省略的动词短语时，人们会预期其错误率会比相反情况更高，因为人们把被动语态误记为主动语态的情况更多。一项书面可接受性判断研究将先行子句的语态（主动/被动）、省略子句的语态（主动/被动）以及最后子句中的省略/非省略情况进行了交叉组合。结果表明，正如具有句法同一性条件的理论所预测的那样，句法不匹配会降低带有省略动词短语的例子的可接受性，但不会降低带有显性动词短语的例子的可接受性。正如对不匹配采用言语错误/修复方法所预测的那样，被动 - 主动不匹配的评级比主动 - 被动不匹配的评级更好，尤其是在有省略的情况下。这一结果消除了任何关于语态不对称现象可能仅仅是由于动词短语省略与被动语态之间的某种不兼容性的担忧。
