This paper explores the identity, or mismatch, of voice in a particular type of ellipsis called pseudogapping (e.g., John called Sarah, and Mary will Jane). Although voice is ipso facto a grammatical category, it is known to interact with information ...
This paper explores the identity, or mismatch, of voice in a particular type of ellipsis called pseudogapping (e.g., John called Sarah, and Mary will Jane). Although voice is ipso facto a grammatical category, it is known to interact with information structure to affect speakers’ perception of it. In three acceptability judgment tasks, we tested how native speakers evaluate voice mismatches in pseudogapping, in comparison to verb phrase ellipsis, and also whether their judgments are affected by the locus of the main contrast or focus—i.e., contrastive topics or auxiliary focus. Unlike previous findings which showed that information structure can modulate how speakers perceive mismatches in verb phrase ellipsis (Kertz 2013), we found no reliable effect of information structure on pseudogapping. This suggests that the impact of focus structure may not be the same across all ellipsis types. We discuss the broader implications of the results from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.