Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
19. Annotating Cohesive Ellipsis in an English-German Corpus
Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
Katrin Menzel [+]
Saarland University
Description
The purpose of this paper is the conceptualisation and cross-linguistic comparison of ellipsis when it is used as a cohesive device. This study is part of a larger DFG-funded research project on German-English contrasts in cohesion (GECCo) [note 1]. The bilingual GECCo corpus is a useful source of data to observe ellipsis patterns across written and spoken registers in order to generate and test various linguistic hypotheses. Bearing in mind the need for careful definition of ellipsis, it is argued here that a combination of a qualitative and quantitative approach will lead to insights that would otherwise be missed. Ellipsis can often be used in an unexpected way for various reasons (language economy, stylistic experimentation, ambiguity of meaning, e.g. in speeches, advertisements or fictional texts). Corpus methods allow us to study ellipses as they occur in real language use.