Linguistics Colloquium: Jong-Bok Kim

Gapping elides a finite verb in the non-initial conjunct of a coordinate structure while VP ellipsis deletes a whole VP after an auxiliary. Unlike these two, pseudogapping elides most of the VP except one remnant. Pseudogapping additionally differs from gapping and VP ellipsis, in that it involves ellipsis of part of a non-finite VP, as illustrated by the following:

1. Kim reads magazines and Lee books. (Gapping)
2. Kim reads magazines, and Lee did too. (VP ellipsis)
3. Kim has read magazines and Lee has books. (Pseudogapping)

This paper provides a Construction Grammar account of pseudogapping that captures both the similarities it shares with VPE and Gapping, while also accounting for the differences. In particular, the paper proposes that all three constructions are subsumed under the macroconstruction Ellipsis Construction. In the meantime,  VPE and Pseudogapping are taken to be under the mesoconstruction Auxiliary Ellipsis Construction. Differences between VPE and Pseudogapping come from their own constructional constraints. This type hierarchical treatment of a family of ellipsis constructions allows us to account for their similarities as well as differences in a streamlined way.  Though many previous attempts have been made to derive the varied features of VPE, Pseudogapping, and Gapping, it is suggested that no previous analysis is up to the challenge of accounting for the full range of data. The present construction-based analysis, which capitalizes on the type hierarchy to capture broad similarities and unique differences among these constructions, allows us to account for the full range of extant data.

Jong-Bok Kim is Professor of the Dept. of English Linguistics and Literature at Kyung Hee University, Seoul. He received the Humboldt Research Award in 2019, given to internationally renowned scientists and scholars by the Alexandar von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1996, he has been working on syntax, semantics, grammatical interfaces, contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics for English and Korean. He has published numerous papers in high impact international journals in the field including Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Journal of Linguistics, English Language and Linguistics, Linguistics, and so forth. He has also published several books by top-ranking international publishers. His recent coauthored book "Syntactic Constructions in English" (2020, Cambridge Univ. Press) is now adopted world-wide as a textbook for English syntax.   http://web.khu.ac.kr/~jongbok/

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