Open AccessNon-canonical word order and subject-object asymmetry in Korean case ellipsis
Author(s) -
Han-Jung Lee,
Nayoun Kim
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2012.24
Subject(s) - ellipsis (linguistics) , word order , subject (documents) , computer science , context (archaeology) , object (grammar) , linguistics , word (group theory) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , history , philosophy , archaeology , library science
The dispreference for subject case ellipsis in OSV sentences has been analyzed as resulting from aviolation of a structural requirement on the position of bare subject NPs (Ahn and Cho 2006a, 2006b,2007). In this study, we present evidence from an acceptability rating experiment demonstrating thatOSV sentences containing a case-ellipsed subject exhibit acceptability patterns different fromungrammatical sentences violating a core syntactic principle on case assignment and that thesesentences are judged acceptable when the subject refers to expected, predictable information incontext. This evidence supports the conclusion that the dispreference for subject case ellipsis inOSV sentences is due to violations of probabilistic constraints that favor case marking for raretypes of subjects and such violations can be remedied by non-syntactic information.