Towards an Empirical Characterisation and a Corpus-Driven Taxonomy of Fragments in Written Present-Day English
Keywords:
fragment, ellipsis, corpus-driven, written discourse, parsingAbstract
This study investigates ‘fragments’ in Present-Day English. Fragments are structurally non-canonical constituents that convey the propositional meaning of a full clause, such as Good Old Hendon next stop or What a weirdo. This investigation constitutes an innovative approach to the topic since it (i) explores fragments in exclusively written (i.e. planned/edited) discourse, and (ii) aims at providing a corpus-driven taxonomy and an empirical account of the constructions, strategies and phenomena that are classifiable as fragments based on linguistically objectifiable (formal/textual) criteria, two areas much neglected in prior literature. The results reveal that fragments are not uncommon in written registers, particularly in letters and novels/stories. The most frequent types identified are phrasal and verbless, followed by clausal, wh-fragments and Small Clauses. Most of them show a high rate of subject and/or verb omission whose recoverability in context is facilitated by means of functional elements or latent lexical items licensed by the construction itself.
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