Revisiting English written VP-ellipsis and VP-substitution: a dependency-based analysis

Abstract The present study quantitatively investigates the structural features of English written VP-ellipsis (VPE) and VP-substitution (VPS) under the theoretical framework of dependency grammar. Results show that: (a) Both VPE and VPS are human language mechanisms that follow the least effort principle; (b) Dependency distance of segmental and discontinuous linguistic units under the influence of VPE and VPS conform to the right-truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution; (c) Dependency-based indices are effective in distinguishing similar structures of VPE and VPS, especially the Do-Support in ellipsis and Do + X in substitution. The study not only explores the regularity of partial segments of human language under the mechanisms of VPE and VPS, but also offers quantitative evidence for distinguishing confusing structures in VPE and VPS, which may aid in raising the retrieving precision of similar linguistic structures in corpora.