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.