ABSTRACT
The previous studies showed that lexical parallelism of arguments (featural similarity, such as animacy, definiteness, etc.) could affect the interpretation of potentially Gapping sentences (and the completion of conjoined sentences or phrases), and that a general structural bias favored the object analysis of Gapping sentences. The experiments in this chapter were designed to test whether the same kind of results would be found in an auditory study as in the written studies, and to evaluate in addition the relative contributions of structure and prosody to the resolution of the ambiguity of these sentences. So far, we have only seen the impact of syntactic and semantic features on the syntactic analysis of ellipsis sentences. If parallel prosody has an effect, though, this would show that the Parallelism Hypothesis holds over other levels of linguistic structure, such as phonological and semantic levels. The claim of the Parallelism Hypothesis is that parallelism between DPs in the prosodic domain should indeed favor an interpretation which places those DPs in corresponding positions.
