Motivation and hypotheses

Previous cross-linguistic work shows that non-canonical word order allows comprehenders to make inferences about the discourse status of constituents during incremental processing (Kaiser and Trueswell, 2004). The aim of the present study was to establish whether com- prehenders assign information structure during the processing of non-canonical V3 clauses in Estonian. I capitalize on a general finding from the psycholinguistic literature on ellipsis that contrastive remnants are preferentially associated with the most recently encountered correlate in the antecedent clause, meaning that remnants with non-local correlates are asso-

ciated with processing difficulty (Clifton and Frazier, 1998; Carlson et al., 2009; Harris, 2015; Harris and Carlson, 2018; Harris, 2019; Lawn, 2020). The preference for the most recently encountered correlate is known as the Locality bias.

The Locality bias (at least in English, where structures with focused remnants have been studied) has been argued to arise from the processor’s access to information-structural representations during the processing of ellipsis (Carlson et al., 2009; Harris and Carlson, 2018). Extensive literature (see e.g. Breen 2014, for an overview) shows evidence that comprehenders assign prosody on silent reading and that this implicit prosody influences parsing decisions. It is assumed that nuclear pitch accent is assigned to the most deeply embedded syntactic constituent (Selkirk, 1986; Cinque, 1993), which is typically a clause- final object. The presence of the nuclear pitch accent in the sentence representation then, in turn, is assumed to facilitate the assignment of Focus status to that constituent. While there isn’t a one-to-one mapping between prosody and information structure in English (a nuclear pitch accent occurs on the clause-final object of the verb whether the object itself or the whole VP is focused), a preference for a pitch accent on an object could explain why a reader is more likely to assign object focus, as opposed to subject focus, by default (Carlson et al., 2009; Harris and Carlson, 2018).3 As a result, an object correlate interpretation would be preferred over a subject correlate interpretation when the remnant is ambiguous between being an object and being a subject.

In order to resolve contrastive remnant ellipsis (i.e. build a syntactic and/or semantic representation for the material that has been elided) the processor needs to pair the rem- nant with its correlate in the antecedent clause. I assume that this process is mediated by information-structural processing (see also evidence from English in Harris and Carlson 2018). Due to a constraint on information-structural parallelism between the ellipsis clause and the antecedent clause, the remnant and its correlate must share the same information- structural status (e.g. Focus, CT). The pairing of the remnant and its correlate allows for

3_{See also recent work by Yan and Calhoun (2020) for evidence that the default focus position influences}

the remainder of the antecedent clause to be identified. This discourse-given material is then taken to be elided in the ellipsis clause.

During the processing of CT remnant ellipsis, the processor recognizes that the remnant is a CT and initiates a search for a constituent that is grammatically compatible with being a CT in the antecedent clause.

In Estonian, clause-initial subjects may act as CTs regardless of the word order of the clause, as exemplified in (71) below. This means that the linear distance between a subject CT remnant and its correlate in the antecedent clause can be kept constant in an experi- mental manipulation, allowing us to examine whether non-canonical V3 order leads to the encoding of the subject as a CT, which would subsequently aid in the processing of subject CT remnant ellipsis. (71) a. AgnesCT Agnes.nom tunneb knows tegelikult actually Joonast, Joonas.part KatrinCT Katrin.nom mitte. neg

‘Actually Agnes knows Joonas, but Katrin doesn’t.’ (V2) b. AgnesCT Agnes.nom tegelikult actually tunneb knows Joonast, Joonas.part KatrinCT Katrin.nom mitte. neg

‘Actually Agnes knows Joonas, but Katrin doesn’t.’ (V3) Crucially, while I assume that every finite clause that is under discussion must involve some form of focus, whether it is broad informational focus (i.e. new information) or narrow focus on a particular constituent (including contrastive focus), CTs are optional. So, while a subject in a subject-initial V2 clause is compatible with being a CT, it is not expected to be marked as a CT by default, due to a preference for simpler discourse structures (see Hoeks et al. 2002, for a discussion of discourse simplicity effects in sentence processing). In V3 clauses, on the other hand, one of the preverbal constituents must be marked for CT status. Particularly, if other preverbal elements are not semantically compatible with being contrastive, such as in the case of speaker-oriented adverbs (72), the subject would necessarily need to be marked as a CT.

(72) Context: You are discussing the your level of certainty about who Agnes is acquainted with. In your mind, different people fall in different categories with respect to how much evidence you have for their relationship to Agnes.

#/?Agnes Agnes._nom tegelikultCT actually tunneb knows Joonast, Joonas._part aga but v˜oib-ollaCT maybe Matit. Mati._part ‘ACTUALLY Agnes knows Joonas, but MAYBE she knows Mati.’

Does the processor interpret V3 word order online to assign CT status to a preverbal element, thus updating the discourse representation upon encountering non-canonical V3 order? How can we tell? If the processor marks the initial subject in structures like (72) above as a CT, the processing of subject CT remnant ellipsis should be facilitated in V3 clauses compared to the corresponding subject-initial V2 clauses.

This experimental comparison may complicated by other factors guiding the processing of canonical versus non-canonical clauses (see e.g. Gorrell 2000; Kaiser and Trueswell 2004; Kristensen et al. 2014, for work on processing difficulty associated with non-canonical word order). This is why in the experiment discussed below, I use CF object remnant ellipsis as a control. Clause-final objects, whether they occur in V2 or V3 clauses, can be felicitously taken to be focus-marked, meaning that any asymmetries between V2 and V3 clauses that are independent of pairing the remnant with its correlate (such as, potentially, slower reading of non-canonical V3 clauses), can be controlled for statistically.

I take a basic topic-comment4 structure – as exemplified in (73) – to be an information- structural default, as it requires the least amount of information to be in the common ground. “Information-structurally marked status” here refers to instances of narrow focus and contrast - CTs and CFs are information-structurally marked as they presuppose a more complex question under discussion (see Chapter 2).

(73) Q: How is Agnes doing?

A: [Agnes]Top [has recently adopted a dog]Comment

There are different theoretical possibilities when it comes to how and when information- structural representations are constructed. Below, I propose two alternatives, and their predictions for the processing of structures like (71). These two hypotheses differ by the proposed time course of computing information-structural representations relative to other (grammatical) representations, such as argument structure (Frazier and Clifton 1996 define the latter as “primary”).

(i) Immediate Discourse Update: The processor immediately commits to an information- structurally marked status for clauses that are not compatible with a simple topic- comment structure.

(ii) Delayed Discourse Update: The processor initially only computes basic syntactic rela- tions such as argument structure. The processing of non-primary relations, including contrast, is delayed (cf. Frazier and Clifton 1996).

The Immediate DU account predicts an advantage for subject-CT remnant ellipsis fol- lowing CT-marking V3 clauses compared to subject-CT remnant ellipsis following canonical V2 clauses. While CT structure can be conveyed through various means (e.g. discourse contexts, prosody, word order), under this hypothesis V3 order in Estonian in particular is expected to have an early effect on CT-marking, as V3 order is not compatible with the clause being a FinP. Rather, as discussed in Chapter 2, the left periphery needs to be ex- panded in order to accommodate multiple preverbal constituents. This results in the clause receiving a marked information-structural status.

The Delayed DU account does not predict an asymmetry between V3 and V2 clauses, if it is the case that CT structure is not assigned until necessitated by encountering CT-remnant ellipsis, where information-structural relations need to be determined in order to compute argument structure and reconstruct the elided material (Harris and Carlson, 2018). Once the CT remnant is encountered and the processor initiates a search for a CT-marked subject correlate in the antecedent clause, initial subjects in V2 and V3 clauses should act as equally

is compatible with models of sentence processing that allow for structural relations to be (temporarily) underspecified (e.g. Frazier and Clifton 1996; Ferreira et al. 2002).

4.2.1.1 Polarity

I was additionally interested in whether the polarity of the antecedent clause bears on the difficulty of processing contrastive ellipsis. Previous corpus work on Estonian (Lindstr¨om, 2005) identifies negation in the clause as a predictor for non-V2 word order. In particular, clauses involving negation show higher rates of verb-final word order than affirmative clauses. Verb-final word order would arise from the presence of a CT constituent along with Focus (for instance, polarity focus) expressed on the verb. It is possible that polarity focus (and CT structure) is more felicitous in negative clauses than in affirmative clauses for pragmatic reasons.

A potential source for this asymmetry is that negated clauses are typically5 _{less infor-}

mative than affirmative clauses. For instance, saying that Mary had porridge for breakfast narrows down the set of possible worlds more than saying that Mary didn’t have porridge for breakfast – she could have had eggs, French toast, cereal, a half a bottle of wine, or skipped breakfast altogether. Assuming that speakers strive for informativity (in the sense of Gricean maxims of Quantity and Relation, Grice 1975), and that listeners interpret utterances with this in mind, I propose that a negated clause makes its contrastive alternatives more salient (i.e. accessible in the discourse) than an affirmative clause does. To exemplify, in (74) it is infelicitous for A’s interlocutor to raise B or B’ as genuine information-seeking questions6.

(74) A: Mary had cereal for breakfast. B: # And/so who didn’t?

B’: # And/so what did she not have?

5_{This is, of course, dependent on the predicate being conveyed. “My dog doesn’t have hair” is arguably}

more informative than “My dog has hair”, in the sense that the former would probably make it easier for you to tell which dog is mine from a lineup of typical, dog-like dogs.

In contrast, in the case of reversed polarity, as seen in (75), the information-seeking questions in B and B’ are natural.

(75) A: Mary didn’t have cereal for breakfast. B: And/So who did?

B’: And/So what did she have?

Examples (74) and (75) show that negative clauses highlight their contrastive alternatives in a way that positive clauses (in the absence of a contrastive context or contrastive prosody) do not. While the present hypotheses (Immediateversus Delayed DU) address grammatical contrast-marking, it is well-documented in the sentence processing literature that contextual and pragmatic effects play a role in parsing decisions as well (e.g. Altmann and Steedman 1988; Tanenhaus et al. 1995; Hoeks et al. 2002; see discussion in Chapter 5). Pragmatic context could thus strengthen the effects of grammatical contrast-marking during incremental processing, or conversely, aid in the computation of contrast in the absence of grammatical context-marking. I was therefore interested in whether polarity facilitated the processing of CTE, or interacted with syntactic CT-marking in the online processing of contrast.

If negative polarity increases the expectation for contrast, we would expect to see a main effect of polarity whereby contrastive ellipsis is easier to process following matrix clauses involving negation, compared to after affirmative matrix clauses. Additionally, polarity may interact with word order if it facilitates the processing of contrast in canonical V2 clauses more than in already contrast-marked V3 clauses.

Further, polarity effects could shed light on how automatic the assignment of contrast in V3 clauses is. Evidence for CT-marking in both affirmative and negative V3 clauses (with polarity having a minimal influence) accompanied by strong polarity effects in V2 clauses would indicate that V3 order leads to CT-marking even in the absence of contextual cues or pragmatic support.