English Ellipsis Research Articles

The Syntax of Verb Phrase Ellipsis in English and Arabic: A Phase Approach

يهدف هذا البحث إلى دراسة الحذف النحوي للعبارة الفعلية في اللغتين الانجليزية والعربية متبعاً منهاج الرحيلة الذي كان محل اهتمام العديد من علماء اللغة والباحثين منذٌ عام 2000 وحتى الآن (وينكلر، 2005؛ جينجل 2007، 2009؛ ألبرشت، 2010)، 2015، 2016؛ روفيريت، 2012؛ وبوسكوفيتش، 2014؛ وآخرين). حيث أتبع هذا البحث المنهج الوصفي التحليلي. وقد تم تحليل الجمل في اللغتين الانجليزية والعربية بطريقة نوعية بتطبيق منهاج الرحيلة وهو عبارة عن أحدث منهاج في النظرية الادنوية. رأس الرحيلة يؤثر ويتحكم في ترخيص حذف العبارة الفعلية في اللغتين. بتطبيق منهاج الرحيلة وجد الباحث بعض أوجه التشابه والاختلاف في البيئات النحوية التي يتم فيها ترخيص حذف العبارة الفعلية في اللغتين الانجليزية والعربية. في اللغة الإنجليزية، (لكن) تدخل مزجاً تحت الرأس (&) في الانشطار الكلي &P بينما في اللغة العربية (لكن) تدخل مزجاً تحت الرأس C في الانشطار الكلي CP، ويوصي الباحث مواصلة البحث والتقصي لهذه الظاهرة النحوية حيث تعتبر أساس لدراسات قادمة وخاصةً بإتباع منهاج الرحيلة.

Filling in the Gaps: Comparing the Use of Verbal Ellipsis in English and Arabic

This study sheds light on the contrastive aspects found between ellipsis in the English and Arabic language. Ellipsis can be described as substituting an element by zero in certain expressions, often to avoid repetition or for stylistic and emphasis purposes. The study deals with the problem of identifying the similarities and differences between the use of ellipsis in Arabic and English especially in terms of types of ellipsis, recoverability and evidence, and the reasons and functions of ellipsis in both languages. It aims to identify the types and categories of ellipsis in both languages, as well the ways through which ellipsis is evident, and eventually draw a comparison between the reasons and purposes of using them in English and Arabic. The work is divided into five parts. The first section is about introducing the aims, hypotheses, procedures, limits, and value of work. Sections Two and Three present an analysis of Ellipsis in English and Arabic, respectively. Section Four compares between ellipsis in English and Arabic, followed by the conclusions and future works in the last section..

Ellipsis in English and Albanian

This research attempted to conduct an in-depth analysis of the text-forming elements based on the fact that cohesive devices are insufficiently treated in the Albanian language, although considerable research and publications have been made in other languages. This study aims to bring evidence in recognizing, determining, and categorizing the structures of ellipsis and substitution which perform in English and Albanian. Comparing these important elements of grammatical cohesion in two languages will bring light upon the differences and similarities between the two languages. It will also show how frequently they are used in English and Albanian. Particularly, the aim is to show how these two mechanisms enable the avoidance of repetition, either by choosing other short words, phrases, and clauses or by removal of words, phrases, and clauses. This study involved samples of fiction and non-fiction texts of English and Albanian language, consisting of two novels and two daily newspapers. The findings of the research indicate that in fiction texts, ellipsis is used more in the Albanian language rather than in English whereas substitution prevails more in English than Albanian. Ellipsis is used more in the Albanian language rather than in English in non-fiction texts too. Nevertheless, the frequency of substitution seems to be the same in both languages with a total of 4 items in English and 3 items in Albanian.

Ellipsis in the headlines of english newspapers (in the material american newspapers usa today, the new york times, the washington post)

The article describes the usage of ellipsis in the headlines of newspapers written in English. A number of headlines with this phenomenon were analyzed, the most effective and often used types of ellipsis were pointed out. The very concept of “ellipsis” has appeared in linguistics since ancient times and is still being refined. Therefore, to begin with, we will analyze the definitions of ellipsis in English, because there are many approaches to its definition. The omission of the subject is not very common - we found 12 examples (6%) of the omission of the subject. And the most rarely used type of ellipsis turned out to be the absence of an introductory verb when citing, only two headings met this criterion (1%).

Auxiliary Verbs and VP Ellipsis in English

Auxiliary Verbs and VP Ellipsis in English

An incremental model of second language speech production mechanisms: Developmental evidence from object ellipsis in second language Chinese speech production

Aims: This study investigates object ellipsis in English and Korean speakers’ second language (L2) Chinese speech production and the effects of first language (L1) influence in L2 Chinese speech production. Design: 59 English speakers and 64 Korean speakers at various Chinese proficiency levels, as well as 16 native speakers of Chinese, participated in the study. In addition to an acceptability judgement test, an utterance-recall task was employed in the study to prime participants for relevant structures. Findings: There are early stages where derivations, such as move, deletion, etc., are not implemented in L2 speech production, although at later stages L2 speech production mechanisms can converge with that of native speakers. No evidence of L1 influence is found, and L2 learners are found to behave differently in the utterance-recall task and the sentence acceptability judgement task. Originality: The study includes data from L2 Chinese learners from beginner to advanced levels and provides a comprehensive picture of structural priming effects on the development of L2 speech production. Implications: There is a discontinuity in the development of L2 speech production mechanisms, and the development of the mechanisms is incremental in nature. Mechanisms for L2 language comprehension are different from those for L2 speech production, at least as far as L2 at the early stages is concerned.

A corpus-based contrastive study of verbless sentences: quantitative and qualitative perspectives

ABSTRACTThe difficulty of automatic processing has forced most analyses of verbless sentences to rely on fragmented data. This paper overcomes fixed annotation and verb-centric syntactic modelling to present a new method of automatic retrieval of verbless sentences. Parallel-text corpora in English and Russian are used with the aim of revealing the semantic factors associated with the absence of the verb. Relying on automatic and manual annotation, the analysis is both quantitative, through the use of descriptive and inferential statistics, and qualitative, through the means of extracting, annotating, and interpreting the results. We propose a novel approach to identifying the differences between English and Russian in terms of their use of verbless sentences. In addition to showing the statistical significance of anticipated verbless sentence frequency differences between the two languages, the results reveal a surprising over-representation of antecedent-based ellipsis in English, and provide several prospects for further quantitative and qualitative corpus-based research of verbless sentences.Abbreviations: ACC: accusative; ADJ: adjective; ADV: adverb; CONJ: conjunction; DAT: dative; DEM: demonstrative; F: feminine; FUT: future; GEN: genitive; INS: instrumental; M: masculine; N: neuter; NOM: nominative; PART: particle; PL: plural; PRE: prepositional; PREP: preposition; PRO: pronoun; PRS: present; PST: past; SG: singular

One-Substitution and Noun Ellipsis in English and Danish

When a speaker of English does not want to repeat the same noun too many times, one-substitution is often used: "She would rather have a big house than a small one" (i.e., a small house). An alternative construction of an elliptical noun phrase is to simply leave out the noun, as when a Danish speaker says: Jeg vil hellere have et stort hus end et lille: "I would rather have a big house than a small". Beginning with observations about one-substitution in English, this paper outlines and discusses one-substitution and noun ellipsis in Danish. With some reservations, the paper supports the argument presented by Günther (2018) that differences between languages regarding one-substitution are based on the inflectional properties of the languages.

MaxElide and Extraction out of VP Ellipsis in English

MaxElide and Extraction out of VP Ellipsis in English

Ellipsis in English Coordinated Clauses in the Novel Entitled 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith

The title of this undergraduate thesis is Ellipsis in English Coordinated Clauses in the Novel Entitled 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith. The aims of the study are to classify the types of ellipsis and to analyze the position of ellipsis in coordinated clauses. The data of this study were in the form of the English coordinated clauses with coordinating conjunction and, or, and but which were found in a novel entitled 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith. The data were collected by using documentation method which was done by close reading on the data source, taking note, and continued by classification. This study used the theory of ellipsis proposed by Quirk, et al (1972) presented by using qualitative method in analyzing the data. The collected data were identified according to the categories of the types and the occurrence of ellipsis in coordinated clauses. This study used descriptive method in presenting the data. The result of this study shows that the types of ellipsis in coordinated are divided into six major namely: ellipsis of subject, ellipsis of auxiliary, ellipsis of subject and auxiliary, ellipsis of predication, ellipsis of head of noun phrase, and ellipsis of subject complement. Ellipsis of subject is the most frequently used type of ellipsis that occur in the data. The ellipsis can occur in the first and in the subsequent clauses in coordinated clauses. However, the ellipsis in the data is mostly anaphoric with the realized items in the first of a series of the clauses.

Another Look at Re-binding in English VP Ellipsis

This paper revisits the issue of when re-binding in cases of VP ellipsis in English is degraded, and a new analysis is given that revises the...

한국인 영어 학습자의 영어 생략문 태불일치 문장 수용성 판단에 관한 연구

한국인 영어 학습자의 영어 생략문 태불일치 문장 수용성 판단에 관한 연구

On wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis bled by subject-auxiliary inversion

This paper investigates wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis in English which is bled by subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI) applying only to the ellipsis clause but not to the antecedent clause. To elucidate the interaction of wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis with SAI, we first reinstate the requirement of successive cyclicity for wh-movement, which will leave behind a trace at the periphery of the VP that undergoes ellipsis. To boot, we redefine the domain for parallelism/identity on extraction-permitting ellipsis, proposing that it includes the three elements such as the extracted element, the ellipsis-licensing element, and the elided constituent. It will be shown below that both the reinstated general requirement for wh-movement and the redefined domain for parallelism are instrumental to accounting for the full paradigm of examples involving wh-extraction out of VP ellipsis interacting with SAI.

A Study of Ellipsis in English and Hindi Short Stories

Every language uses elliptical structures, but how frequently nominal, verbal and clasual ellipsis occur in Hindi and English language, is the focus of this study. This paper is an effort to analyze ellipsis in two short stories: a work in Hindi language (a short story by Munshi Premchand), and a work in English language (a short story by Ernest Hemingway). The comparison is supported by the statistical analysis. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the diversity and complexity of ellipsis in two writers' works through language. The paper follows the theoretical functional grammar approach of Halliday and Hasan.

Preposition omission in English ellipsis

The availability of preposition omission in ellipsis is assumed to follow from the possibility of preposition stranding in corresponding non-elliptical clauses (Merchant 2001). To test this assumption I sampled 409 ellipsis remnants from three corpora of American English, and developed generalized mixed-effects models of preposition omission in ellipsis. The results show that preposition omission is, among others, sensitive to gradient constraints independently found to influence preposition placement in interrogative clauses, without being correlated with the possibility of preposition stranding. This finding challenges evidence for syntactic parallels between elliptical constructions and their nonelliptical counterparts, and hence, for deletion-based approaches to ellipsis.

Noun ellipsis in English: adjectival modifiers and the role of context

This article analyses adjectival modification in elliptical NPs based on a corpus analysis. It illustrates the fact that descriptive adjectives can be used without nominal heads in English. Whereas in spoken language adjectives denoting more inherent properties feature prominently when the referents are present in the text-external world, no particular types of adjectives appear in written language. In terms of the latter, two major types of linguistic contexts are identified which do not require the use of a nominal head. It is argued that a conception of ‘contrast’ as a ‘non-identity’ condition cannot account for the variation betweenone-replacement and noun ellipsis since it holds for both phenomena. Similarly, partitivity is argued not to be a relevant requirement for the use of adjectives without nouns.

DP Ellipsis as Independent Phenomena from pro in pro-drop Languages

Previous studies proposed that there is no CP ellipsis in English (Kennedy and Merchant 2000) and Korean (Ahn and Cho 2009, 2010, cf. Park 2009). In particular, Ahn and Cho (2009, 2010) suggested that apparent CP ellipsis in Korean be in fact DP ellipsis (null realization of DPs in more neutral terms), which is subsumed to pro-drop in Korean. Specifically, Ahn and Cho (2010) make it clear that there is no genuine DP ellipsis in Korean and apparent DP ellipsis is explained with pro. However, close examination of other data reveals that this is not always the case; considering sentences with reflexives, NPIs, indefinite DPs and free choice DPs, we claim that Korean has both pro with no internal structure and DP ellipsis with an internal structure in the ellipsis site, which explain frequent zero realization of argument DPs in many constructions. We propose that the DP contained in the target clause undergoes partial deletion - the DP is stripped of phonological and semantic features only - when it is identical with the one in the antecedent clause. That is, the internal structure remains intact in the ellipsis site. As to the interpretation of the null argument, we propose that the ellipsis site is filled in with semantic features by overt nominals in the antecedent clause and obtains interpretation at LF (cf. Oku 1998, Saito 2007).

On the Absence of CP Ellipsis in English and Korean

This paper aims to show that CP deletion in English and Korean is not possible. We suggest that the absence of CP ellipsis results from the premise that lexical categories such as V dont bear an E feature, hence cannot license the deletion of their CP complements. We claim that apparent CP ellipsis is equivalent to DP deletion, which is subsequently subsumed to the occurrence of Pro.

Local licensers and recovering in VP ellipsis

The core properties of VP ellipsis in English and Portuguese may be captured assuming that the elliptical constituent is licensed under local c-command by a verbal element in a sentence functional head. However, the lack of VP ellipsis in most Romance languages and in German, despite the existence of verb movement to sentence functional projections in these languages, suggests that a parameter is involved. Empirical evidence indicates that this parametric variation should not be attributed to a specific functional head because the functional head occupied by the verbal licenser may vary across languages and language varieties. So we will claim that the existence vs. absence of VP ellipsis in the languages considered in this study is due to the features of the functional head that intervenes between the verbal licenser and the elliptical vP phase.

Subject ellipsis in English

Abstract English is probably least known as a language in which subject ellipsis in finite clauses may occur, given its extensive use of a dummy subject to keep the subject position filled. Subject ellipsis is a common phenomenon for pro-drop languages by definition, since the identity of the subject is morphologically shown by the verbal inflection. However, despite little presence of this subject–verb agreement in English, subject ellipsis is, in fact, a common phenomenon in conversation and casual letters. Based on a small corpus analysis, this paper delineates various features, constraints and connotations surrounding subject ellipsis in English from the viewpoint of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Subject ellipsis occurs in the casual register with first person as the predominant referent, but is also triggered mainly by anaphora and conventional expressions. While subject ellipsis under anaphora is restricted to occur immediately after the sentence with the referent, in conventional expressions it occurs without locational constraints, often implying evasive and dismissive motives and therefore discouraging responses. Moreover, it is often claimed that the prerequisite for subject ellipsis is recoverability of the referent and that anaphora, of which ellipsis is a part, creates discourse coherence. This study concludes that while recoverability must be maintained for subject ellipsis to emerge, discourse coherence is, on the contrary, often suspended by subject ellipsis.