Discourse Structure and Syntactic Parallelism in VP Ellipsis

1. Introduction This paper presents psycholinguistic data from three magnitude estimation experiments that suggest a syntactic parallelism condition on VP ellipsis (VPE) that can be modulated by discourse coherence, and applies to VPE both within and across sentences. Section 1 will outline some of the arguments for and against syntactic and semantic accounts of VPE, and lay out the predictions of existing proposals with respect to syntactic mismatch in VPE. Section 2 reviews previous psycholinguistic studies on VPE. The three magnitude estimation experiments are presented in sections 3-5. Experiment 1 looks at cases of voice and category mismatch in VPE with sen-tential coordination, replicating some basic contrasts found by Arregui et al. (2006). Experiment 2 compares voice-mismatched VPE under different discourse coherence relations (Kehler 2000), and Experiment 3 compares voice mismatch in VPE in coordinate structures and across sentence boundaries. Together, these findings support the existence of a syntactic paral-lelism condition on VPE which applies at the level of discourse structure. The observation that syntactic mismatch effects are observed to the same extent across discourse and within individual syntactic structures suggests that at least certain syntactic alternations, like passive, are encoded at the level of discourse representations. Empirical consequences of assuming different sources for mismatch-related unacceptability are discussed in section 6.