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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

A Comparative Study of the Discourse Properties of Verb Phrase Ellipsis and British DO

Kimberly Oger

Résumé

In the realm of verbal anaphora it has been suggested (Pullum & Wilson 1977, Baltin 2012, Thoms & Sailor 2018, inter alia) that the phenomenon known as "British DO" as in (1), which involves the use of non-finite forms of DO, might be considered as a form of verb phrase ellipsis, or VPE. (1) I said that and I realized that I'd said it and I shouldn’t have done. (BNC, British DO) Compare: I shouldn't have (VPE) However, no empirical evidence has as yet been put forward to support this view. I present two parallel corpus-based studies focusing on the information structure and discourse conditions which characterize VPE and British DO. The findings show that British DO may indeed be analyzed as a form of VPE but is restricted to specific discourse conditions. Since Kehler (2000) and Kertz (2008) first suggested that acceptability of VPE was directly dependent on discourse structure and information structure respectively, few corpus-based studies have focused specifically on these aspects. One such study was Miller (2011), in which 122 occurrences of VPE involving DO were examined. The collection of occurrences suffers however in that no other pre-ellipsis auxiliaries were taken into account. Thus the observations made in that and subsequent articles (particularly Miller & Pullum 2013; Miller & Hemforth 2014) are limited to a single operator. This may explain at least in part the fact that they focus essentially on polarity without necessarily taking into account the full range of information conveyed by the auxiliaries involved in VPE. Furthermore, Miller's analysis cannot be used as a basis for comparison with British DO as this structure almost never involves the presence of auxiliary DO as a pre-elliptical operator. In order to provide such a basis, my first study focuses on 222 occurrences of VPE taken from Bos & Spenader's (2011) corpus of verbal anaphora. The sample includes the full range of operators including to. Each occurrence was carefully analyzed in terms of subject-focus and auxiliary-focus as defined in Kertz (2018; 2013). Special attention was paid not only to polarity, but also tense, modality and aspect. The analysis confirms that auxiliary focus is by far the most common type of VPE (81.5%). Furthermore, multiple-correspondence analyses show polarity alternation to be the main influencing factor observed, followed by tense, modality and aspect, in that order. The second study involves a sample of 418 occurrences of British DO collected from the Spoken BNC and analyzed according to the same criteria. British DO is shown to involve auxiliary focus in nearly every case (over 97%). However, unlike VPE, modality is determined to be the leading factor licensing British DO, whereas polarity focus is involved in only 11.3% of occurrences. In light of these findings, I conclude that British DO may well be a variant of VPE, but that the discourse conditions licensing its use are far more restricted than those governing conventional VPE.
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Dates et versions

hal-04523475 , version 1 (27-03-2024)

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Paternité - Pas de modifications

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  • HAL Id : hal-04523475 , version 1

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Kimberly Oger. A Comparative Study of the Discourse Properties of Verb Phrase Ellipsis and British DO. Experimental and Corpus-based Approaches to Ellipsis 2022 (ECBAE 2022), Societas Linguistica Europaea, Aug 2022, Bucharest (hybrid), Romania. ⟨hal-04523475⟩
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