Verb phrase ellipsis
[1][2][3] The reliance on auxiliary verbs gives English a distinctive mechanism for VP ellipsis, making it one of the most researched languages in this area.
For instance, Japanese employs a phenomenon known as verb-stranding VP ellipsis, where the verb remains while the rest of the phrase is elided.
[5][6] This cross-linguistic perspective reveals that VP ellipsis is not unique to English, but varies in its structural realization across languages.
Canonical cases of antecedent-contained ellipsis occur when the elided material appears inside a quantified object NP.
[13] An alternative explanation, pursued in dependency grammars, is to assume that the basic unit of syntax is not the constituent, but rather the catena.
[18] The flexibility of English allows for greater variation in the licensing and interpretation of VP ellipsis, which may explain its prominence in linguistic studies.
[19] While English VP ellipsis is the most studied, evidence suggests the phenomenon occurs in other languages, though its mechanisms vary.
Instead, Japanese typically uses argument ellipsis, where specific elements like objects or subjects are omitted, while the verb remains.
[20] The strict Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order in Japanese and the absence of auxiliary verbs to syntactically license ellipsis further challenge the notion of verb-stranding VPE.
Tanaka highlights that Japanese instead relies on mechanisms like argument omission and pro-drop to achieve ellipsis-like interpretations[20] In Mandarin Chinese, VP ellipsis works similar in English that both omits the verb phrase and rely on auxiliary verb.
However research suggests that Mandarin speakers tends to interpret VP ellipsis primarily through semantic and pragmatic cues rather than syntactic reconstruction.
The presence of the adverb 也 (yě, "also") explicitly marks agreement or inclusion, providing additional clarity to the omitted content.
Unlike English, Mandarin does not require auxiliary verbs to syntactically license VP ellipsis.
Rather, the omission of the verb phrase is contextually resolved, reflecting a greater reliance on discourse coherence and pragmatic inference.
[22] The above sentence shows the use of both intonation (bold italicized font) and the modal auxiliary (does)--both of which are required for English verb phrase ellipsis.
[24] For speakers, VPE is used to lighten the load by reducing the number of words and amount of syntax required in working memory while constructing a sentence.
