Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Verbless Sentences from a Contrastive Corpus Approach

Résumé

This paper explores the semantico-pragmatic features of English and Russian verbless sentences, i.e. structures in which the typical marker of sentential status – the finite verb – is absent. Integrating corpus methods, contrastive linguistics and enunciative analysis, we study the use of English verbless sentences in a 1,4-million-word parallel and comparable corpus of dialogue-based 19th–21st century fiction (Bondarenko, 2021; 2019). Persuaded that crosslinguistic comparison can make evident linguistic constraints that remain hidden from a monolingual perspective, we examine the phenomenon in English and Russian, two languages with profoundly different typological characteristics regarding the verb. Contrastive methodology (Guillemin-Flescher, 2003), in which a particular linguistic phenomenon has traditionally been studied from the perspective of a manually-analyzed series of translation correspondences, is combined with recent progress in digital corpora, natural language processing and statistical tools. Potential pitfalls of parallel-texts studies (e.g. Nádvorníková, 2017; Stolz, 2007; Baker, 1996) are addressed through corpus design and multi-directional analysis.

The findings presented develop the semantico-pragmatic portrait of a prototypical verbless sentence in the two languages. A statistical correlation with deictic and indexical lexical markers reveals that verbless sentences depend more on common ground knowledge for their resolution than verbal sentences. Amongst the several functions identified through key-word and n-gram analysis, the marking of indefinite reference is found to be a statistically key feature that distinguishes verbless and verbal sentences in English, e.g. (1)–(3).

(1) He moved his eyes quickly away. What a strange meeting on a strange night. He remembered nothing like it save one afternoon a year ago […]
(2) Rakitin evidently wanted to speak his mind. “A crime in your nice little family. It will take place between your dear brothers and your nice, rich papa.”
(3) “To a duel!” the old fool screamed again, breathless and spraying saliva with each word.

Furthermore, contrastive corpus analysis shows that the variation between the presence and the absence of the verb is a particularly sensitive issue for English in questions, where it is found to use absence as a grammatical marker of indirect speech acts.

to use absence as a grammatical marker of indirect speech acts. The contrastive corpus method also reveals pragmatic explanations as to why Russian has twice as many verbless sentences as English. Rather than syntactic or semantic recoverability, we identify pragmatic differences between the two languages concerning (a) topic activation (English appears to re-active the topic which correlates with the realization of the verb), and (b) the marking of the difference between direct and indirect speech acts in questions, which explain some of the frequency differences in the use of the phenomenon in the two languages.

Finally, we also explore the implications of our results for the theoretical debate concerning verbless structures in language (e.g. Merle, 2009; Elugardo & Stainton, 2005). In particular, taking a contrastive approach to syntactic ellipsis (McShane, 2000) and information structure (Lambrecht, 1994) gives us new empirical grounds for defending a conversationally implicated propositional meaning for structures without a syntactic predicate, and leads us to elaborate a model of the sentence that strives to be capable of accounting for the verbless phenomenon.

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Dates et versions

hal-04962269 , version 1 (22-02-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04962269 , version 1

Citer

Antonina Bondarenko. Verbless Sentences from a Contrastive Corpus Approach. SLE 2024: 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLe); University of Helsinki, Aug 2024, Helsinki, Finland. ⟨hal-04962269⟩
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