Data and Theory Hand in Hand: Determinants of Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis in Modern English

Abstract

This chapter analyses Post-Auxiliary Ellipsis in Modern English through the statistical modelling of the variation between its two subtypes: Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), in We don’t want to postpone the conference, but due to the pandemic we will postpone the conference, and Pseudogapping (PG), as in If you don’t tell me, you will tell your mum. VPE involves the ellipsis of the constituent following the licensor, whereas in PG a remnant is kept a er the licensor. The research question addressed here is: what is the nature of the linguistic determinants that trigger either VPE or PG? Every example of VPE and PG in the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE) was analysed addressing a number of grammatical, semantic/discursive and processing linguistic predictors. A fixed-e ects regression model, supported by Random Forests, determined the relative weight of the potential determinants of either VPE or PG in Modern English.