A corpus-based contrastive study of verbless sentences: quantitative and qualitative perspectives

The difficulty of automatic processing has forced most analyses of verbless sentences to rely on fragmented data. This paper overcomes fixed annotation and verb-centric syntactic modelling to present a new method of automatic retrieval of verbless sentences. Parallel-text corpora in English and Russian are used with the aim of revealing the semantic factors associated with the absence of the verb. Relying on automatic and manual annotation, the analysis is both quantitative, through the use of descriptive and inferential statistics, and qualitative, through the means of extracting, annotating, and interpreting the results. We propose a novel approach to identifying the differences between English and Russian in terms of their use of verbless sentences. In addition to showing the statistical significance of anticipated verbless sentence frequency differences between the two languages, the results reveal a surprising over-representation of antecedent-based ellipsis in English, and provide several prospects for further quantitative and qualitative corpus-based research of verbless sentences.Abbreviations: ACC: accusative; ADJ: adjective; ADV: adverb; CONJ: conjunction; DAT: dative; DEM: demonstrative; F: feminine; FUT: future; GEN: genitive; INS: instrumental; M: masculine; N: neuter; NOM: nominative; PART: particle; PL: plural; PRE: prepositional; PREP: preposition; PRO: pronoun; PRS: present; PST: past; SG: singular