Colloquium Martijn Hennink

Ellipsis, the non-expression of sentence elements whose meaning can be retrieved by the hearer, is frequent in everyday language. This research focuses on three types of ellipsis, namely right-node raising
(a), conjunction reduction
(b), and gapping
(c). Elided elements are between brackets.

a) Jan koopt (appels) en Piet verkoopt appels.
b) Jan koopt appels en (Jan) verkoopt peren.
c) Jan koopt appels en Piet (koopt) peren.

250 conjoined sentences taken from Alpino-parsed versions of the Dutch spoken (CGN) and written (Clef) corpus were manually analysed. This provided initial frequency data and helped in developing search patterns. Automatic search of the remaining selection was successful for conjunction reduction (b), but right-node raising (a) and gapping (c) were parsed incorrectly by Alpino, making the search difficult. The obtained data suggests that the frequency of the different types of ellipsis in Dutch is similar to that in English (Meyer, 2000).