Incremental sentence production inhibits clausal coordinate ellipsis: A treebank study into Dutch and German

Karin Harbusch


Abstract
From two corpus studies into varieties of clausal coordination in English (Meyer, 1995 and Greenbaum & Nelson, 1999), it is known that the incidence of clausal coordinate ellipsis (CCE) is about two times higher in written than in spoken language. We present a treebank study into CCE in written and spoken Dutch and German which confirms this tendency. Moreover, we observe considerable differences between written and spoken language with respect to the incidence of four main types of clausal coordinate ellipsis—Gapping, Forward Conjunction Reduction (FCR), Backward Conjunction Reduction (BCR), and Subject Gap with Finite/Fronted Verb (SGF). We argue that the detailed data pattern cannot be accounted for in terms of audience design, and propose an explanation based on the assumption that during spontaneous speaking—but not during writing—, the scope of online grammatical planning is basically restricted to one (finite) clause.
Anthology ID:
2011.dnd-2.2
Volume:
Dialogue Discourse Volume 2
Month:
Year:
2011
Address:
Editors:
David Schlangen, Hannes Rieser, Matthew W. Crocker
Venue:
DND
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Note:
Pages:
313–332
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-dnd/2011.dnd-2.2/
DOI:
10.5087/dad.2011.112
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karin Harbusch. 2011. Incremental sentence production inhibits clausal coordinate ellipsis: A treebank study into Dutch and German. Dialogue & Discourse, 2:313–332.
Cite (Informal):
Incremental sentence production inhibits clausal coordinate ellipsis: A treebank study into Dutch and German (Harbusch, DND 2011)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-dnd/2011.dnd-2.2.pdf