33.3605, Review: Syntax, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Gandón-Chapela (2020)
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Subject: 33.3605, Review: Syntax, Text/Corpus Linguistics: Gandón-Chapela (2020)
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Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2022 21:46:01
From: Neda Chepinchikj [neda.cepincic at gmail.com]
Subject: On Invisible Language in Modern English
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-3045.html
AUTHOR: Evelyn Gandón-Chapela
TITLE: On Invisible Language in Modern English
SUBTITLE: A Corpus-based Approach to Ellipsis
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2020
REVIEWER: Neda Chepinchikj, University of New South Wales
SUMMARY
This monograph is a detailed study of the linguistic phenomenon of ellipsis
(omission of information from an utterance, which is inferred from the
linguistic or extralinguistic context) in the Modern English language (the
period between 1700 and 1914). The author approaches the analysis of this
phenomenon from both a grammatical and a discursive perspective. The aim of
the study is twofold – analytical and methodological. The former relates to
the analysis of ellipsis data in Modern English and the comparison of its
findings with findings for ellipsis in Present-Day English. The latter refers
to a new algorithm that automatically detects and retrieves all instances of
ellipsis in the data corpus analysed. Since the book analyses and discusses
ellipsis diachronically, looking at data from Modern English, it offers a
valuable insight into the state of affairs regarding this important linguistic
phenomenon historically, while also comparing the findings with those for
Present-Day English arrived at in other studies (Bos & Spenader, 2011; Hardt &
Rambow, 2001; Hoeksema, 2006; Levin, 1986; Miller, 2014; Nielsen, 2005;
Sharifzadeh, 2012). Thus, the volume, predominantly written for a scholarly
audience, offers comparative insights into the development of ellipsis in
English.
The study aims to investigate whether the phenomenon of ellipsis in English
has undergone any significant changes in the recent history of the language by
conducting a corpus-based analysis of post-auxiliary ellipsis (PAE) in data
from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. PAE ellipsis covers
those cases in which a verb phrase, noun phrase, prepositional phrase,
adjective phrase, or adverbial phrase is omitted after modal auxiliaries, the
auxiliaries ‘be’, ‘have’ and ‘do’, and the infinitival marker ‘to’. The two
subtypes of PAE that the study focuses on are verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) and
pseudogapping (PG). Thus, this volume relies on existing theories of ellipsis
to undertake an empirical study into the existence, features, frequencies and
nature of PAE in the said period of the English language. In addition, the
present volume also proposes an algorithm for the automatic detection and
retrieval of all instances of PAE in the corpus used.
The data analysis focuses on a few variables with regard to ellipsis, those
being the following: grammatical, semantic/discursive, usage, and processing
variables. Thus, the analysis is multidimensional and, in terms of grammar,
examines not only the types of auxiliaries that license ellipsis but also the
types of syntactic linking between the antecedents and the ellipsis sites, the
syntactic domain where ellipsis happens, and other features that relate to the
type of elided material and grammatical variables of the antecedents (such as
tense, polarity, voice, aspect, and modality). In terms of the
semantic/discursive traits analysed, these include the type of clause
(declarative, interrogative, or imperative), the types of anaphora and focus
(subject choice, auxiliary choice, object choice, etc.), the type of turn
(same or different speaker), and the existence of sloppy identity (instances
where there can be different interpretations of the referent of ellipsis). The
author has also categorised the instances and features of ellipsis by
sub-periods within the corpus (eighteenth and approximately nineteenth
centuries), by genre (speech-related versus writing-related) as well as in
terms of lexical and syntactic distance, where the former refers to distance
between the antecedent and the ellipsis site in number of words and the latter
in number of clauses.
The results of the author’s data analysis indicate a few important insights.
Regarding the grammatical variables analysed, the author has found that modal
auxiliaries are the most common triggers of ellipsis in both VPE and PG
constructions, which is very similar to the findings for Present-Day English
(Bos and Spenader, 2011). With respect to syntactic linking, PG occurs mostly
in comparative contexts, which is similar to Present-Day English, with the
only difference being that there is a much higher incidence of this phenomenon
in the latter study (90%) versus 70% in this volume’s findings. VPE, on the
other hand, mostly shows no syntactic linking between the source and the
target of ellipsis – a finding which is also similar to the Present-Day
English findings by Bos and Spenader (2011). Regarding syntactic domains where
ellipsis occurs, it has been shown that subordination is the most common
domain. Moreover, both PG and VPE license the omission of predominantly verbal
material, similarly to the findings for Present-Day English. Finally, the data
attest to predominant matches of polarity and voice. The most commonly found
aspectual option in both the source and the target of ellipsis is
nonperfective-nonprogressive, whereas the most commonly used tenses are past
and present.
Regarding the semantic and discursive features of PAE, the findings indicate
that the most common types of clauses where ellipsis occurs are declarative
clauses, although there are also different combinations in the corpus. In
terms of type of anaphora, the data show that PAE is predominantly anaphoric
and that cataphora is impossible in PG in Modern English, which is aligned
with the findings for Present-Day English, too. As for the focus types, PG
mostly appears with an object-auxiliary choice, whereas VPE favours auxiliary
choice focus. Sloppy identity is attested in VPE, but no such instances have
been found for PG, similarly to the studies for Present-Day English by Nielsen
(2005) and Bos and Spenader (2011). Furthermore, regarding turn distribution,
most of the PAE cases occur within the same turn. Finally, with regard to the
genre and period distribution, VPE is dominant across both centuries (18th and
19th) and it increases in frequency in the later period, whereas PG has a
marginal representation and its frequency decreases over time, which also
seems to be the trend in Present-Day English. PAE is also four times more
common in speech-related genres than in writing-related ones. In terms of the
most typical surroundings of PG, it appears in contexts where the antecedent
is in the same sentence, the target of ellipsis is contained in a different
clause with no intervening clauses between them, and the lexical distance is
between zero and ten words. As for VPE, it is generally more local, with a
lexical distance between zero and five words.
EVALUATION
The present volume is a valuable and detailed study of the phenomenon of
ellipsis in the Modern English period. It is particularly beneficial for
linguists and grammarians and of special interest to scholars who take
interest in diachronic and comparative studies of linguistic phenomena. The
book is quite meticulous in both its theoretical and methodological approaches
to the phenomenon at hand. Thus, one need not be an expert in ellipsis to
understand the concept and its features, as these are well established and
discussed in the monograph.
Furthermore, the volume accomplishes what it sets out to do – analyse the
instances of PAE in Modern English and compare them to those in Present-Day
English, thus answering the question of whether there have been significant
changes in this phenomenon over time. It also explains in detail the algorithm
innovated to detect and retrieve the instances of PAE in the Penn Parsed
Corpus of Modern British English. The data analysis is very detailed and
multidimensional as the author looks at ellipsis from a number of perspectives
and considers a few variables.
With respect to its positioning within the wider literature on the topic, this
book makes explicit and detailed reference to relevant works in the field. It
also positions the phenomenon of ellipsis within various theoretical
frameworks: traditional grammar, Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), and
Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), thereby clearly defining and
establishing the concept, its development, and the challenges in its study and
analysis. While the author does not take any particular stance with respect to
the theoretical approaches, she draws clear connections among all of them and
also manages to point out the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Since this monograph also compares two different sets of findings – those from
the author’s data analysis and those of other scholars who have studied the
same phenomenon in Present-Day English corpora – it may have been more
valuable to use a more equivalent second set of data, in both size and genre.
Ideally, this analysis would have been also conducted by the author herself
rather than relying on the analyses of others. However, it is very
understandable why such an endeavour may have been too ambitious, since the
data analysis of the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English is already a
large project in itself. Nevertheless, this point has been emphasised by the
author as a consideration for future research.
The author suggests some issues for potential future research, such as
investigating PAE both quantitatively and qualitatively, in other, earlier or
later, periods of English (Middle English, Early Modern English and
Present-Day English). Other elliptical constructions could also be studied,
such as gapping, stripping, and sluicing. Regarding PAE, the author points to
further research into the length and syntactic complexity of the antecedent of
ellipsis itself, as the study suggests that lexical distance and syntactic
distance are not identical and equivalent variables.
REFERENCES
Bos, J., & Spenader, J. (2011). An annotated corpus for the analysis of VP
ellipsis. Language
Resources and Evaluation, 45(4), 463-94.
Hardt, D., & Rambow, O. (2001). Generation of VP ellipsis: A corpus-based
approach.
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational
Linguistics. Toulouse, France, 9 – 11 July 2001, 290-7.
Hoeksema, J. (2006). Pseudogapping: Its syntactic analysis and cumulative
effects on
acceptability. Research on Language and Computation, 4, 335-52.
Levin, N. S. (1986). Main verb ellipsis in spoken English. (Outstanding
dissertations in
linguistics). New York.
Miller, P. (2014). A corpus study of pseudogapping and its theoretical
consequences. In C.
Piñón (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics, 10, 73-90.
http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss10/
Nielsen, L. A. (2005). A corpus-based study of verb phrase ellipsis
identification and resolution.
PhD dissertation. University of London King’s College London, London.
Sharifzadeh, S. (2012). Recherches sur do, lexique et grammaire. PhD
dissertation. University of Paris-Sorbonne, Paris.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr Neda Chepinchikj is a linguist and a published author. She currently works
at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research
interests include telecinematic discourse, language and gender, multimodality,
conversation analysis and sociolinguistics. She has published her work in
high-ranked journals and has recently published a scholarly book on language
and interaction in cinematic discourse.
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