A Contrastive Corpus Approach to Absence: Methodological Developments and Implications
Résumé
This paper focuses on the controversial and often marginalised phenomenon of the verbless sentence, i.e. structures in which the typical syntactic marker of sentential status – the verbal predicate – is absent. Although the structures exist in many languages (e.g. Benveniste, 1971), the difficulty of automatically processing them in corpora has greatly limited their study. Presenting recent developments in the corpus treatment of the structures, the paper explores how the contrastive corpus approach has enhanced our understanding of the verbless phenomenon and its implications for language models.