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Focus structure affects comparatives: Experimental and corpus work

From the book Prosody in Syntactic Encoding

  • Katy Carlson

Abstract

Comparative constructions havemany possible syntactic continuations, including bare NPs, VP Ellipsis, and full clauses. This project explores their processing and use by examining the frequency of different comparative structures within a set of over 4000 sentences from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and by a written and an auditory questionnaire on the interpretation preferences of comparative bare NP ellipsis. The corpus data shows that ellipsis structures are much more frequent than full clauses in comparatives, with bare NP ellipsis most frequent (50% of the data). We suggest that clauses are dispreferred because of the repetition and prosodic deaccenting involved in producing complete clauses compared to structures that retain primarily the contrastive information. Although 80% of bare NP examples in the corpus contrast with the previous clause’s subject, ambiguous bareNP remnants are more likely to be interpreted as contrasting with the object in comprehension. Since contrastive accent placement strongly affects the preferred interpretation, as does NP parallelism, we suggest that a default expectation of focus on the last argument accounts for the object bias in processing. Thus both the syntactic structures found in the corpus and the interpretation of ambiguous examples can be tied to different aspects of the focus structure of comparatives.

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