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

Review “The first sustained diachronic corpus investigation of elliptical phenomena using automatic detection techniques for modern and earlier stages of English. Gandón-Chapela has discovered and categorized an impressive range of new example types, and this book is sure to serve as the foundation for a wide range of future work.” ―Jason Merchant, Vice Provost and Lorna P. Straus Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago, USA Product Description 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. About the Author Evelyn Gandón-Chapela is Assistant Lecturer of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Cantabria, Spain. She is an associate member of the LVTC (Language Variation and Textual Categorisation) research group at the University of Vigo, Spain.