The interplay between case-drop and parallelism in Korean gapping

This experimental study examines twosyntactic analyses of dative or accusative case-drop in Korean gapping (akaright-node-raising or right-peripheral ellipsis): LF copying (Abe and Hoshi 1997) andPF deletion (Kim 1997). We employ an online acceptability rating experiment toinvestigate to what extent the acceptability of Korean gapping is modulated by case-dropof a remnant and word order between remnants. The experimental findings suggestthat linear non-parallelism elicits a processing cost for gapping and case-drop is a costlyoperation. We argue that the parallelism effect follows from the parser’s generalpreference to keep the structure of each conjunct maximally parallel in a coordinationstructure (Kim et al. 2020). Given this, we conclude that case-drop phenomena in Koreangapping are better explained by a PF deletion analysis, supplemented with extra deletion(An 2019; Erschler 2022) and ellipsis parallelism (Frazier et al. 2000; Frazier and Clifton2001), rather than by an LF copying analysis.