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Revisiting English written VP-ellipsis and VP-substitution: a dependency-based analysis

  • Zheyuan Dai ORCID logo , Haitao Liu ORCID logo EMAIL logo and Jianwei Yan ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 22, 2022

Abstract

The present study quantitatively investigates the structural features of English written VP-ellipsis (VPE) and VP-substitution (VPS) under the theoretical framework of dependency grammar. Results show that: (a) Both VPE and VPS are human language mechanisms that follow the least effort principle; (b) Dependency distance of segmental and discontinuous linguistic units under the influence of VPE and VPS conform to the right-truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution; (c) Dependency-based indices are effective in distinguishing similar structures of VPE and VPS, especially the Do-Support in ellipsis and Do + X in substitution. The study not only explores the regularity of partial segments of human language under the mechanisms of VPE and VPS, but also offers quantitative evidence for distinguishing confusing structures in VPE and VPS, which may aid in raising the retrieving precision of similar linguistic structures in corpora.


Corresponding author: Haitao Liu, Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China; and Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Zijingang Campus, No. 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China, E-mail: ; and Jianwei Yan, Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Zijingang Campus, No. 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China, E-mail:

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments on our paper.

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Received: 2022-07-08
Accepted: 2022-09-27
Published Online: 2022-12-22

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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