Hunting for post-auxiliary ellipsis in a parsed corpus of English

Abstract

Despite the existence of a great number of studies that have analysed ellipsis from a theoretical point of view, only recently has it been studied empirically using corpora (Hardt 1997; Hardt and Rambow 2001; Nielsen 2005; Bos and Spenader 2011). These corpus studies have tried to discover new methods and algorithms for the automatic detection and retrieval of ellipsis in Present-Day English. In this paper, I extend these studies by presenting an automatic retrieval algorithm for cases of Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis in Late Modern English (1700-1914), using data from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English.