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.
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and valuable comments on our paper.
References
Aelbrecht, Lobke & William Harwood. 2015. To be or not to be elided: VP ellipsis revisited. Lingua 153. 66–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.10.006.Search in Google Scholar
Altmann-Fitter. 2013. Altmann-Fitter user guide. Available at: https://www.ram-verlag.eu/software-neu/software/.Search in Google Scholar
Baltin, Mark. 2012. Deletion versus proforms: An overly simple dichotomy? Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30. 381–423. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9157-x.Search in Google Scholar
Bos, Johan. 2012. Robust VP ellipsis resolution in dr theory. In Staffan Larsson & Lars Borin (eds.), From quantification to conversation, vol. 19, 145–159. Rickmansworth: College Publications.Search in Google Scholar
Bos, Johan & Jennifer Spenader. 2011. An annotated corpus for the analysis of VP ellipsis. Language Resources and Evaluation 45(4). 463–494. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9142-3.Search in Google Scholar
Bruening, Benjamin. 2010. Language-particular syntactic rules and constraints: English locative inversion and do-support. Language 86(1). 43–84. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.0.0201.Search in Google Scholar
Chen, Heng & Haitao Liu. 2016. How to measure word length in spoken and written Chinese. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 23(1). 5–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2015.1071147.Search in Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam & Howard Lasnik. 1993. The theory of principles and parameters. In Joachim Jacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang Sternefeld & Theo Vennemann (eds.), Syntax: An international handbook of contemporary research, 506–569. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110095869.1.9.506Search in Google Scholar
Culicover, Peter W. & Ray Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199271092.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine & Christopher, D. Manning. 2008. Stanford typed dependencies manual. Technical report, 338–345. Stanford: Stanford University.10.3115/1608858.1608859Search in Google Scholar
Eger, Steffen. 2013. A contribution to the theory of word length distribution based on a stochastic word length distribution model. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 20(3). 252–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2013.799910.Search in Google Scholar
Fang, Yinjie & Maocheng Liang. 2019. A comparable context-based multifactorial analysis of relativizer omission by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English. Foreign Language Teaching and Research 51(3). 435–446.Search in Google Scholar
Fortin, Catherine R. 2007. Indonesian sluicing and verb phrase ellipsis: Description and explanation in a minimalism framework. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Gandón-Chapela, Evelyn. 2020. On invisible language in modern English: A corpus-based approach to ellipsis. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.10.5040/9781350064546Search in Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood & Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. (English Language Series 9). London & New York: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Hardt, Daniel. 1993. Verb phrase ellipsis: Form, meaning, and processing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Hardt, Daniel. 1997. An empirical approach to VP ellipsis. Computational Linguistics 23(4). 525–541.Search in Google Scholar
Heringer, Hans Jürgen, Bruno Strecker & Rainer Wimmer. 1980. Syntax: Fragen-Lösungen- Alternativen. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.Search in Google Scholar
Houser, Michael J. 2010. The syntax and semantics of do so anaphora. Berkeley: University of California dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316423530Search in Google Scholar
Hudson, Richard. 1984. Word grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Hudson, Richard. 1995. Measuring syntactic difficulty. Available at: https://dickhudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Difficulty.pdf.Search in Google Scholar
Jiang, Jingyang & Haitao Liu. 2015. The effects of sentence length on dependency distance, dependency direction and the implications-based on a parallel English–Chinese dependency treebank. Language Sciences 50. 93–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2015.04.002.Search in Google Scholar
Johnson, Kyle. 2001. What VP ellipsis can do, and what it can’t, but not why. In Mark Baltin & Chris Collins (eds.), The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, 439–479. Oxford: Blackwell.10.1002/9780470756416.ch14Search in Google Scholar
Kehler, Andrew & Gregory Ward. 1999. On the semantics and pragmatics of identifier so. In Ken Turner (ed.), The semantics/pragmatics interface from different points of view, 233–256. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Search in Google Scholar
Köhler, Reinhard. 1986. Zur linguistischen Synergetik. Struktur und Dynamik der Lexik. Bohum: Brockmeyer.Search in Google Scholar
Lee, Yong-Hun. 2012. A unified approach to VP-ellipsis and VP-anaphora. In Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 272–291. Stanford: CSLI Publications.10.21248/hpsg.2012.16Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Haitao. 2008. Dependency distance as a metric of language comprehension difficulty. Journal of Cognitive Science 9. 159–191. https://doi.org/10.17791/jcs.2008.9.2.159.Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Haitao. 2010. Dependency direction as a means of word-order typology: A method based on dependency treebanks. Lingua 120. 1567–1578. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2009.10.001.Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Haitao. 2018. Language as a human-driven complex adaptive system. Physics of Life Reviews 26(27). 149–151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2018.06.006.Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Haitao, Richard Hudson & Zhiwei Feng. 2009. Using a Chinese treebank to measure dependency distance. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 5(2). 161–174. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2009.007.Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Haitao & Chunshan Xu. 2012. Quantitative typological analysis of Romance languages. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 48(4). 597–625. https://doi.org/10.1515/psicl-2012-0027.Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Haitao, Chunshan Xu & Junying Liang. 2017. Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages. Physics of Life Reviews 21. 171–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2017.03.002.Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Jinlu & Haitao Liu. 2021. A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers. Linguistics Vanguard 7(1). 20210020. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0020.Search in Google Scholar
Lobeck, Anne. 1995. Ellipsis: Functional heads, licensing and identification. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780195091816.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Mačutek, Ján & Gejza Wimmer. 2013. Evaluating goodness-of-fit of discrete distribution models in quantitative linguistics. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 20(3). 227–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2013.799912.Search in Google Scholar
McShane, Marjorie J. 2005. A theory of ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780195176926.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Mel’čuk, Igor A. 1988. Dependency syntax: Theory and practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Search in Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason. 2001. The syntax of silence: Sluicing, islands, and the theory of ellipsis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780199243730.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason. 2013a. Diagnosing ellipsis. In Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng & Norbert Corver (eds.), Diagnosing syntax (Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics), 537–542. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199602490.003.0026Search in Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason. 2013b. Voice and ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 44(1). 77–108. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00120.Search in Google Scholar
Merchant, Jason. 2019. Ellipsis: A survey of analytical approaches. In Jeroen van Craenenbroeck & Tanja Temmerman (eds.), The Oxford handbook of ellipsis, 18–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198712398.013.2Search in Google Scholar
Miller, Philip. 1990. Pseudogapping and do so substitution. Papers from the 26th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 293–305. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Linguistic Society.Search in Google Scholar
Miller, Philip. 2002. Les emplois non finis de do auxiliaire [The unfinished jobs of auxiliary do]. In Claude Delmas (ed.), Construire et Reconstruire en Linguistique Anglaise: Syntaxe et Sémantique (CIEREC Travaux 107), 185–198. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne.Search in Google Scholar
Miller, Philip. 2013. Usage preferences: The case of the English verbal anaphor do so. In Stefan Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar, 121–139. Stanford: CSLI Publications.10.21248/hpsg.2013.7Search in Google Scholar
Miller, Philip. 2014. A corpus study of pseudogapping and its theoretical consequences. In Christopher Piñón (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10, 73–90. Paris: CSSP.Search in Google Scholar
Moulton, Keir. 2019. Adverbs in VP ellipsis: An experimental investigation of antecedent selection. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 64(3). 475–508. https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2018.45.Search in Google Scholar
Nielsen, Leif Arda. 2005. A corpus-based study of verb phrase ellipsis identification and resolution. London: King’s College London dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Osborne, Timothy & Kim Gerdes. 2019. The status of function words in dependency grammar: A critique of Universal Dependencies (UD). Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics (2016–2021) 4(1). 17. 1–28. https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.537.Search in Google Scholar
Ouyang, Jinghui & Jingyang Jiang. 2018. Can the probability distribution of dependency distance measure language proficiency of second language learners? Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 25(4). 295–313.Search in Google Scholar
Popescu, Ioan-Iovitz & Karl-Heinz Best & Gabriel Altmann. 2014. Unified modeling of length in language. Lüdenscheid: RAM-Verlag.Search in Google Scholar
Pustet, Regina & Gabriel Altmann. 2005. Morpheme length distribution in Lakota. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 12(1). 53–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/092961070500055335.Search in Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Svartvik Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language text. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan. 1976. Deletion and logical form. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts institute of technology dissertation.Search in Google Scholar
Schäfer, Lisa, Robin Lemke, Heiner Drenhaus & Ingo Reich. 2021. The role of UID for the usage of verb phrase ellipsis: Psycholinguistic evidence from length and context effects. Frontiers in Psychology 12. 1672. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661087.Search in Google Scholar
Sigurd, Bengt, Mats, Eeg-Olofsson & Joost, van de Weijer. 2004. Word length, sentence length and frequency-Zipf revisited. Studia Linguistica 58(1). 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0039-3193.2004.00109.x.Search in Google Scholar
Tesnière, Lucien. 2015. Elements of structural syntax. Translated by Timothy Osborne and Sylvain Kahane. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.185Search in Google Scholar
Thoms, Gary. 2011. From economy to locality: Do-support as head movement. Glasgow, Ms: Strathclyde University.Search in Google Scholar
Thoms, Gary. 2013. Lexical mismatches in ellipsis and the identity condition. In Stefan Keine & Shayne Sloggett (eds.), Proceedings of the forty-second annual meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS 42). Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.Search in Google Scholar
Williams, Edwin. 1977. Discourse and logical form. Linguistic Inquiry 8(1). 101–139.Search in Google Scholar
Yan, Jianwei & Haitao Liu. 2022. Semantic roles or syntactic functions: The effects of annotation scheme on the results of dependency measures. Studia Linguistica 76(2). 406–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/stul.12177.Search in Google Scholar
Zipf, George K. 1936. The psychobiology of language: An introduction to dynamic philology. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Search in Google Scholar
Zipf, George K. 1949. Human behaviour and the principle of least effort: An introduction to human ecology. Cambridge: Addison-Wesley Press.Search in Google Scholar
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2023
- Research Articles
- Tapped /r/ in RP: a corpus-based sociophonetic study across the twentieth century
- Revisiting English written VP-ellipsis and VP-substitution: a dependency-based analysis
- Agreeing objects in Zulu can be indefinite and non-specific
- On the semantics of (negated) approximative kaada in Classical Arabic: a case for embedded exhaustification
- Imperatives as persuasion strategies in political discourse
- Primate origins of discourse-managing gestures: the case of hand fling
- Basic word order typology revisited: a crosslinguistic quantitative study based on UD and WALS
- The effect of L2 German on grammatical gender access in L1 Polish: proficiency matters
- Validation of two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge on web-based testing platforms: brief assessments
- Validation of two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge on web-based testing platforms: long-form assessments
- Cerebral asymmetries in the processing of opaque compounds in L1 Polish and L2 English
- Are preschool children sensitive to the function of accessibility markers? A visual world study with German-speaking three- to four-year-olds
- Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,130 Chinese words: relationships with other semantic and lexical psycholinguistic variables
- A corpus-based study of quoi in French native speech
- The overlooked effect of amplitude on within-speaker vowel variation
- Contextualized word senses: from attention to compositionality
- Words of scents: a linguistic analysis of online perfume reviews
- Constraction: a tool for the automatic extraction and interactive exploration of linguistic constructions
- The Red Hen Anonymizer and the Red Hen Protocol for de-identifying audiovisual recordings
- Novel metaphor and embodiment: comprehending novel synesthetic metaphors
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2023
- Research Articles
- Tapped /r/ in RP: a corpus-based sociophonetic study across the twentieth century
- Revisiting English written VP-ellipsis and VP-substitution: a dependency-based analysis
- Agreeing objects in Zulu can be indefinite and non-specific
- On the semantics of (negated) approximative kaada in Classical Arabic: a case for embedded exhaustification
- Imperatives as persuasion strategies in political discourse
- Primate origins of discourse-managing gestures: the case of hand fling
- Basic word order typology revisited: a crosslinguistic quantitative study based on UD and WALS
- The effect of L2 German on grammatical gender access in L1 Polish: proficiency matters
- Validation of two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge on web-based testing platforms: brief assessments
- Validation of two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge on web-based testing platforms: long-form assessments
- Cerebral asymmetries in the processing of opaque compounds in L1 Polish and L2 English
- Are preschool children sensitive to the function of accessibility markers? A visual world study with German-speaking three- to four-year-olds
- Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,130 Chinese words: relationships with other semantic and lexical psycholinguistic variables
- A corpus-based study of quoi in French native speech
- The overlooked effect of amplitude on within-speaker vowel variation
- Contextualized word senses: from attention to compositionality
- Words of scents: a linguistic analysis of online perfume reviews
- Constraction: a tool for the automatic extraction and interactive exploration of linguistic constructions
- The Red Hen Anonymizer and the Red Hen Protocol for de-identifying audiovisual recordings
- Novel metaphor and embodiment: comprehending novel synesthetic metaphors