On Invisible Language in Modern English: A Corpus-Based Approach to Ellipsis

Shortlisted for the ESSE 2022 Book Award
Winner: AEDEAN Leocadio Martìn Mingorance Book Award for Theoretical and Applied English Linguistics 2020

This book investigates the syntactic phenomenon of ellipsis and the linguistic forces that trigger it. It presents the results of a corpus-based study which takes into account grammatical, semantic/discursive, usage-related and processing variables.

Evelyn Gandón-Chapela builds upon the few empirical works on ellipsis in Present-day English to offer the first comparative analysis of ellipsis and its development throughout the recent history of the English language. Moreover, the book also provides a complex query algorithm which automatically detects and retrieves cases of ellipsis, leading to successful recall ratios, applicable to a wide range of parsed corpora.