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Gender asymmetries in ellipsis: An experimental comparison of markedness and frequency accounts in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2021

JON SPROUSE ,
TROY MESSICK Open the ORCID record for TROY MESSICK [Opens in a new window]  and
JONATHAN DAVID BOBALJIK
JON SPROUSE
Affiliation:
Program in Psychology, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi 129188, United Arab Emirates [email protected]
TROY MESSICK
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, 18 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA [email protected]
JONATHAN DAVID BOBALJIK
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA [email protected]
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Abstract

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in the actor/actress class, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in the prince/princess class, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

Keywords

acceptability judgmentsellipsisexperimental syntaxgender asymmetriesword frequency
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 345 - 379
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant BCS-1347115 to JS. Portions of this work were completed while the authors held appointments at the University of Connecticut. For comments and suggestions on the material reported here, we would like to thank three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees, as well as audiences at the University of Vienna and the Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Gender (Berlin).

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