Ellipsis with last and next in written American news language

Abstract

Limiting their discussion of ellipsis to VP-ellipsis, most grammars do not cover the elliptical use of last and next, e.g. the last of Mr. Forbes and one after the next, and treat such uses of last/next as pronouns. Such perfunctory treatment of last/next as pronouns, however, does not allow for a rigorous analysis of elliptical last/next, which are neither fully lexical nor fully pronominal, yet whose usage within a nominal construction without an overt head noun is nevertheless fully referential. A close examination of 581 tokens of elliptical last/ next retrieved from the Brown Corpus and the North American News Text Corpus has revealed that they can be categorized as either conventional, proximal textual, or distal textual ellipsis. In terms of reference tracking strategies, the intended referent for elliptical last/next is most often retrieved anaphorically. Also noteworthy are the findings that elliptical last/next almost always combine with the, although they can combine with possessives, demonstratives, or the null article, and that elliptical next is much more likely to be preceded by a trigger such as one than is elliptical last, giving rise to a construction such as “ one NP … the next (NP).”