Abstract
We investigate the underexplored question of when speakers make use of the omission phenomenon verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) in English given that the full form is also available to them. We base the interpretation of our results on the well-established information-theoretic Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis: Speakers tend to distribute processing effort uniformly across utterances and avoid regions of low information by omitting redundant material through, e.g., VPE. We investigate the length of the omittable VP and its predictability in context as sources of redundancy which lead to larger or deeper regions of low information and an increased pressure to use ellipsis. We use both naturalness rating and self-paced reading studies in order to link naturalness patterns to potential processing difficulties. For the length effects our rating and reading results support a UID account. Surprisingly, we do not find an effect of the context on the naturalness and the processing of VPE. We suggest that our manipulation might have been too weak or not effective to evidence such an effect.
Highlights
When speakers want to get a message across, they often have the choice between ellipsis and the corresponding full form (1) and it is not always obvious which form to use
We found a significant interaction between FORM and LENGTH (χ 2 = 11.85, p < 0.001): Full forms with a long repeated verb phrase are rated significantly worse than full forms with a short verb phrase as compared to utterances with VP ellipsis
Our naturalness rating study confirms the prediction of the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis on length effects: The results show that while participants overall prefer utterances with short repeated verb phrases and with VP ellipsis, long redundant full forms are dispreferred as compared to the corresponding VP ellipsis conditions
Summary
When speakers want to get a message across, they often have the choice between ellipsis and the corresponding full form (1) and it is not always obvious which form to use. The term refers to a kind of constituent ellipsis where the omitted element, i.e., the target of ellipsis, is a complete verb phrase. A corresponding auxiliary is left in the position of the omitted verb phrase (1). C. and Dean should play football too. The extensive literature on this phenomenon has focused on systemic questions like the modeling of the ellipsis site, the relation between the ellipsis site and its antecedent (or postcedent) and the
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