Contrastive Focus, Usage Probability and Gradients in Korean Case Ellipsis
Hanjung Lee · Discourse and Cognition · 2011
Acceptability of case ellipsis on focused subject NPs of differing argument roles exhibits clear asymmetry which so far has not received a plausible explanation. This study explores the gradient acceptability of case ellipsis on the focused subject NPs of three subtypes of one-place predicates in Korean. Through a rating experiment which tested the acceptability of case marking and case ellipsis for the subject of unergative verbs and two types of unaccusative verbs that are contrastively focused, we demonstrate that the graded acceptability of case ellipsis for subtypes of focus subject is correlated with the frequency with which the subject accommodates new information. This finding provides strong support to the view that native speakers’ knowledge of grammar includes not only some degree of knowledge of probabilistic information, as suggested by prior work, but even access to fine-grained probabilities.