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Ellipsis with last and next in written American news language
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Ellipsis with last and next in written American news language Isaiah WonHo Yoo * Sogang University, Department of English, C.P.O. Box 1142, Seoul, Republic of Korea
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 15 December 2009 Received in revised form 24 October 2010 Accepted 23 November 2010 Available online 8 January 2011
Limiting their discussion of ellipsis to VP-ellipsis, most grammars do not cover the elliptical use of last and next, e.g. the last of Mr. Forbes and one after the next, and treat such uses of last/next as pronouns. Such perfunctory treatment of last/next as pronouns, however, does not allow for a rigorous analysis of elliptical last/next, which are neither fully lexical nor fully pronominal, yet whose usage within a nominal construction without an overt head noun is nevertheless fully referential. A close examination of 581 tokens of elliptical last/next retrieved from the Brown Corpus and the North American News Text Corpus has revealed that they can be categorized as either conventional, proximal textual, or distal textual ellipsis. In terms of reference tracking strategies, the intended referent for elliptical last/next is most often retrieved anaphorically. Also noteworthy are the findings that elliptical last/next almost always combine with the, although they can combine with possessives, demonstratives, or the null article, and that elliptical next is much more likely to be preceded by a trigger such as one than is elliptical last, giving rise to a construction such as ‘‘one NP . . . the next (NP).’’ ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Ellipsis Determiners The null article American news language Corpus linguistics Cohesion
1. Introduction 1.1. Background and context of the problem Ellipsis can be defined as the omission of words recoverable or understood from the situational context or the surrounding text (Biber et al., 1999; Carter and McCarthy, 2006). Biber et al. (1999:156) group ellipsis into two categories, depending on whether the elided elements are recoverable from the situational context—i.e. ‘‘situational’’ ellipsis, which is particular to informal conversation—or from the surrounding text, i.e. ‘‘textual’’ ellipsis. Carter and McCarthy (2006:181) add another category to the mix, ‘‘structural’’ ellipsis, distinguishing it from textual ellipsis:
(1)
A: Don’t know what’s gone wrong here. B: Oh. Need any help? (situational; understood: I don’t know . . . Do you need . . .)
(2)
He applied and got the job. (textual; understood from previous clause: . . . and he got the job.)
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 2 705 8340; fax: +82 2 715 0705. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.11.014
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The car he was driving was stolen. (structural; optional use of that: The car that he was driving . . .)
Other grammars also cover the topic of ellipsis; however, their discussion of ellipsis is mostly limited to various instances of VP-ellipsis. For instance, defining ellipsis as ‘‘omit[ting] words rather than repeating them,’’ the Collins COBUILD English Grammar (2005:396) cites the following as examples of ellipsis: (4)
They can distinguish finer detail than we can.
(5)
You look just as bad as he does.
Halliday and Hasan (1976:160), on the other hand, include in their discussion of ellipsis ellipted NP’s following same and other, e.g. (6): (6)
I’ve used up these three yellow folders you gave me. Can I use the other?
Although Halliday and Hasan (1976:160) single out same and other as the only adjectives, or semi-determiners, that ‘‘regularly occur elliptically,’’ by no means is it difficult to find sentences in which last and next are used elliptically, too. Many grammars treat such instances of last and next as pronouns, however (e.g. Collins COBUILD English Grammar, 2005:119): (7)
Smithy removed the last of the screws.
(8)
You missed one meal. The next is on the table in half an hour.
Treating such uses of last and next as pronouns glosses over the fact that unlike other canonical pronouns, which do not normally combine with the definite article in the singular, both last in (7) and next in (8) are preceded by the. Moreover, such perfunctory treatment of last and next as pronouns does not allow for a more rigorous analysis of elliptical uses of last and next, whose complexity is evident in the following examples from the Brown Corpus: (9)
Billy Gardner’s line double, which just eluded the diving Minnie Minoso in left field, drove in Jim Lemon with the winning run with two out in the last of the ninth to give the Minnesota Twins a 6-5 victory over the Chicago White Sox Monday. (Brown)
(10)
Before he could snap it on, a stinging blow caught him in the ribs. He lashed out blindly with his right. There was a thick, squashy crack of fist on flesh. Something hard grazed his knuckles. He put everything he had into the next and aimed down where the stomach ought to be. (Brown)
Unlike the last in (7) and the next in (8)—whose full NP’s, i.e. the last screw and the next meal, can be easily reconstructed with a word immediately before or after the phrase—it is unclear how the last in (9) and the next in (10) should be reconstructed into their respective full NP’s, such as the last half of the ninth inning and the next punch/blow. 1.2. Noun, pronoun, or ellipsis? Whether last and next in examples (7)—(10) are pronouns or elliptical uses seems to depend on whether the term pronoun is used as a form/category label or a function label. By stating that the postdeterminers last and next are ‘‘used as pronouns,’’ reference grammars such as the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999:281) and the Cambridge Grammar of English (Carter and McCarthy, 2006:357) make it clear that they are using the term pronoun as a function label while using the term postdeterminer as a form label. Unlike reference grammars, however, dictionaries provide a different form label for a different use of a word, e.g. the noun form and use of sleep in I didn’t get enough sleep last night and the verb form and use of the same word in I slept eight hours last night. When there is a mismatch between form and use as in the case of last and next in examples (7)–(10), i.e. the last and the next are not fully pronominal but still function as pronouns, a discrepancy between dictionaries is bound to occur. The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (1992), for instance, recognizes last as both a pronoun and a noun but next as neither; the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2000) defines both last and next not as pronouns but as nouns; and the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2006) defines last as both a pronoun and a noun but next only as a pronoun. Of all the examples of last and next as pronouns given in those dictionaries, only the following example in the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2006:963) is not preceded by the definite article, like a canonical pronoun: (11)
He predicted that the region’s economy would grow by about six per cent both this year and next.
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Needless to say, this confusing discrepancy between learner dictionaries could be remedied if all the examples of last and next above are treated as instances of ellipsis.1 This paper will thus investigate the following research questions regarding the elliptical use of last and next: 1. Are the three categories of ellipsis discussed above also applicable to last and next used elliptically? 2. What are the reference strategies for identifying or reconstructing the elided words of elliptical last and next? In addition to answering these questions, this paper will also address (a) whether there are any other types of words than the with which elliptical last and next can combine and (b) whether any particular words or phrases trigger the use of elliptical last and next. 2. Corpora and data collection The importance and the difficulty of choosing the most appropriate corpus for any given study cannot be overstated (Biber et al., 1998; Hunston, 2002; Kennedy, 1998; Meyer, 2002), and this study proved no exception. No spoken corpus of American English contains enough tokens of elliptical last and next. The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, for example, contains fewer than 30 tokens of elliptical last or next.2 Answering the first research question requires analyzing data from a balanced corpus as the three aforementioned categories of ellipsis concern general English; thus, this study collected its first set of data from the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English (the Brown Corpus), a balanced corpus of written American English of about 1 million words printed in 1961. The entire Brown Corpus, however, contained mere 25 tokens of elliptical last and 20 of elliptical next. With no other balanced corpus of American English from which to retrieve more data,3 a specialized corpus, the North American News Text Corpus, was chosen because ‘‘last and next are most common in news’’ among the four major registers that Biber et al. (1999:282) examined: conversation, fiction, news, and academic prose. A collection of journalistic text of over 350 million words in American English, the North American News Text Corpus contains samples published between 1994 and 1997 in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post (Latwp) (52 million words), the New York Times News Syndicate (173 million words), the Reuters News Service (85 million words), and the Wall Street Journal (40 million words). Of these four sources, the 1996 Latwp, which contains over 20 million words, was chosen as the primary source from which to retrieve data for this study because the year 1996 is the most recent year common to all sources and, with other papers in its syndicated newswires, the Latwp has a better likelihood of representing the language. The data for the present study have been retrieved by using a commercially available concordancing program called MonoConc Pro 2.2. Concordance searches of last and next in the 1996 Latwp corpus at first generated 27,567 tokens of last and 10,527 tokens of next. These total numbers of last and next, however, also included scores of tokens that occurred in the same context but in different articles. For example, included in the 10,527 tokens of next were two tokens of exactly the same concordance lines that read ‘‘. . . to add their pet projects to the Senate bill when it comes up for action next month.
One is a proposal by Sen. James M. Jeffords, R-Vt., to ban . . .’’ A further examination of the sources of these two tokens revealed that they occurred in two different articles written by the same person on the same topic: one was entitled ‘‘House Addresses Health Insurance Portability’’ and the other ‘‘House Approves Broad Health Care Reform Bill.’’ Altogether, 763 tokens of last and 236 tokens of next were found in articles written by the same authors, and these duplicate tokens were excluded from data analyses, reducing the total numbers of last and next to 26,804 and 10,291, respectively. 3. Interpreting elliptical last and next 3.1. Three categories of ellipsis with last and next In order to ascertain whether the three aforementioned categories of ellipsis—i.e. situational, textual, and structural—are also applicable to elliptical last and next, I first analyzed the 674 tokens of last and the 393 tokens of next retrieved from the Brown Corpus and found that last was used elliptically in 25 tokens (3.7%) and next in 20 tokens (5.1%). A careful examination of these 45 tokens yielded another set of categories more suitable for elliptical last and next: conventional and textual, the latter of which further breaks into proximal textual and distal textual. 1 Arguing that ellipsis in NP’s is limited to the omission of the relative clause, as in (i), and that of a partitive complement, as in (ii), Huddleston and Pullum (2002:1511–1518) consider example (iii) neither a pro-nominal nor ellipsis but a fused head:
(i)
The plays she directed were more successful than [the musicals __].
(ii)
There were lots of books in the attic, but [the majority __] were trashy novels.
(iii)
This bus is full: we’ll have to wait for [the next].
2 It is unclear why elliptical last and next occur more frequently in written data than in spoken data. One possibility is that written English, especially academic prose and news texts, highly values brevity, a fact which also gives rise to some grammatical constructions particular to written English such as participial phrases and appositives (Hacker, 2009). 3 As with the Brown Corpus, the Frown Corpus does not contain enough tokens of elliptical last and next. The first, as well as the second, release of the American National Corpus, on the other hand, is still not a balanced corpus (Reppen and Ide, 2004).
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As with situational ellipsis, whose elided elements are recoverable not from the surrounding text but from the situational context (Biber et al., 1999; Carter and McCarthy, 2006), the elided word in conventional ellipsis is not found in the surrounding text. Unlike situational ellipsis, however, conventional ellipsis requires the use of conventional knowledge in order to retrieve the elided word, as in (12) and (13), as well as in (9) above: (12)
Rising costs have increased the difficulties of the elderly, and I would be the last to say they should not receive consideration. (Brown)
(13)
They thought it would be a chance for you to make a life out where nobody will be thought any better than the next except for just what’s inside of them. (Brown)
Although the phrase the last of the ninth in (9) does not contain the words half and inning, readers who know the game of baseball understand that these words are conventionally omitted. In (12) and (13), despite the absence of the word person, the reader understands the phrases the last and the next to mean ‘‘the last/next person,’’ using the knowledge that the head noun person is conventionally omitted in such a context. Of the 25 tokens of the last in elliptical use, 10 are used in conventional ellipsis; however, only one of 20 tokens of elliptical next occurs in conventional ellipsis. As defined by Biber et al. (1999) and Carter and McCarthy (2006), textual ellipsis is found where the surrounding text, or the linguistic context, contains the elided words. Although Carter and McCarthy also distinguish structural ellipsis from textual ellipsis, the difference between the two is not clearly explained, nor does it seem helpful to introduce a completely different category when the elided words in both types of ellipsis are recoverable from the linguistic context. Thus, for the analysis of ellipsis with last and next, textual ellipsis is further divided into proximal and distal depending on whether the elided elements occur within the same clause, i.e. proximal, or across clausal boundaries, i.e. distal. As Table 1 shows below, 11 of the 25 tokens of elliptical last and 13 of the 20 tokens of elliptical next are used in proximal textual ellipsis, e.g. (14) and (15), where the antecedents love and summer occur in the same clause as their last and next, respectively: (14)
Escalation is their first love and their last.
(15)
It made him pretty hot under the collar, after the idea Miss Sis had given him, to be told by Miss Kiz that her holy spa was all reserved for this summer and next. (Brown)
(Brown)
Occurring across clausal boundaries, distal textual ellipsis accounts for the remaining four tokens of last and six tokens of next. One common property shared by those four tokens of last in distal textual ellipsis is that the elliptical phrase in each token needs two noun phrases for its complete interpretation, one in italics and the other underscored, e.g. (16): (16)
Linguistic charting of the transcribed interview flags points where the patient’s voice departs from expected norms. It flags such possible breakdowns of communication as rehearsed dialogue, the note of disapproval, ambivalence or ambiguity, annoyance, resentment, and the disinclination to speak at all—this last often marked by a fade-in beginning of sentences. (Brown)
Although this last finds the elided word in the italicized phrase breakdowns of communication, it actually refers to the underscored phrase: the disinclination to speak at all. Likewise, the interpretation of the next in (10) above requires two different phrases: a stinging blow and lashed out blindly with his right. Not all tokens of next in distal textual ellipsis, however, require two phrases for their interpretation, e.g. (17), where the interpretation of the next requires the noun phrase picture only: (17)
In the first picture the knife is just beginning to advance into the inclined surface which was left from the previous chip formation. In the next, the shear plane angle is high, and extends to the inclined work surface. (Brown)
As these three categories of ellipsis are based on a small number of tokens from the Brown Corpus, more tokens of elliptical use of last and next retrieved from the 1996 Latwp corpus were also analyzed to ascertain whether a larger set of data corroborates these findings. The 1996 Latwp corpus contains 26,804 tokens of last and 10,291 tokens of next, of which 371 tokens of last (1.4%) and 165 tokens of next (1.6%) are used elliptically. As with the tokens retrieved from the Brown Corpus, all these tokens of elliptical last and next fall into either conventional, proximal textual, or distal textual ellipsis. As Table 1 shows below, while proximal textual ellipsis accounts for about 74% of the 371 tokens of last (274 tokens), conventional and distal textual ellipsis more or less split the remaining tokens (50 tokens, 13.5%, and 47 tokens, 12.6%, respectively). As with last, the vast majority of the tokens of next are used in proximal textual ellipsis, accounting for 137 of the 165 tokens (83.0%). Of the remaining 28 tokens, 24 (14.5%) are used in distal textual ellipsis and only four (2.4%) in conventional ellipsis.
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Table 1[29_TD$IF] Three categories of ellipsis with last and next. Last Latwp Conventional Textual Proximal Distal Total
Next Brown
50 (13.5%)
10
274 (73.9%) 47 (12.6%) 371 (100%)
11 4 25
Latwp 4 (2.4%) 137 (83.0%) 24 (14.5%) 165 (100%)
Brown 1 13 6 20
It was observed with the small number of tokens of last in distal textual ellipsis from the Brown Corpus that they need two noun phrases for their complete interpretation. A number of last tokens in proximal textual ellipsis in the 1996 Latwp corpus also show the same property, e.g. (18), where the elided word cock-up occurs in the same clause as the last, with the NP that identifies the referent, i.e. mad-cow disease, coming two sentences later: (18)
In many ways, it has been a typical British ‘‘cock-up,’’ the last in a long line stretching back from Lloyds of London through the battle of the Somme to the Charge of the Light Brigade. It has involved the British establishment, unnecessary secrecy, a series of muddled decisions (most, as usual, taken by decent people acting in good faith) and, above all, animals. For a long time, mad-cow disease was, to be honest, a bit of a joke; even the name seemedfunny. Now, suddenly, it seems, literally, to be a matter of life and death. Even if the end result is not a stream of human fatalities, it will still createcarnage in the English countryside. (Latwp)
In a nutshell, the analysis above has revealed another set of categories for ellipsis that is more suitable for the elliptical uses of last and next: conventional, proximal textual, and distal textual. Conventional ellipsis requires the use of conventional knowledge in order to retrieve its elided word, whereas textual ellipsis finds its elided word in its surrounding text. Although the antecedent of proximal textual ellipsis occurs in the same clause, that of distal textual ellipsis occurs across clausal boundaries, and the complete interpretation of distal, as well as proximal, textual ellipsis may require reference to two different phrases in the surrounding text. 3.2. Reference strategies for identifying elided words The elided word can be found either anaphorically (backward-looking), cataphorically (forward-looking), or exophorically (situationally-cued) with respect to elliptical last and next. As Table 2 shows below, the elided word occurs anaphorically in more than half of the 371 tokens of last, e.g. (19), this tendency is even stronger with the tokens of next, accounting for more than 95% of the 165 tokens, e.g. (20): (19)
This is the first letter I have written you. It may be the last.
(20)
Gardella, for example, can intelligently discuss Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique in one paragraph, then fail to conjugate a verb correctly (‘‘The reason we was . . .’’) in the next. (Latwp)
(Latwp)
The elided word also occurs cataphorically in quite a few tokens of last (76 of the 371 tokens), e.g. (21), but only in three tokens of next, e.g. (22): (21)
The house was sold by consumer reporter David Horowitz, who is leasing nearby while shopping for a smaller house now that the last of his children has left for college. (Latwp)
(22)
The Clinton administration will get its first high-level chance to sound out Yeltsin’s intentions on July 12 when Vice President Gore travels to Moscow for the next in a series of meetings with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, who was reconfirmed in office Thursday. (Latwp)
The elided words in (21) and (22), or their plural forms, are found soon after the elliptical last and next. In fact, except for the one token in (23), all the other cataphoric elided words occur in the same complex NP’s, as in (21) and (22), and thus are instances of proximal textual cataphora: (23)
Christopher sought to reassure those who will be rejected: ‘‘The first will not be the last. NATO will remain open to new members after we have taken in the first group.’’ (Latwp)
Even in (23), the elided word, group, occurs relatively soon after mention of the last, which is a pattern generally found with any cataphoric referent (Yap and Celce-Murcia, 2000).
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Table 2[30_TD$IF] Reference strategies for identifying the elided words of elliptical last and next. Last
Anaphoric Cataphoric Exophoric Total
Next
Tokens
Percentage
Tokens
Percentage
245 76 50 371
66.0% 20.5% 13.5% 100%
158 3 4 165
95.8% 1.8% 2.4% 100%
The remaining 50 tokens of last, e.g. (24), and four tokens of next, e.g. (25), contain elided words that have exophoric reference, all of which are cases of conventional ellipsis, i.e. the elided words time (mention or news is also possible) in (24) and person in (25) are conventionally understood: (24)
‘‘We’re still in May,’’ he [Bob Dole] said. ‘‘The election is still in November, the last I heard . . . I want to make certain that when we do announce a major program that people are listening.’’ (Latwp)
(25)
It is not clear just who in the government will be the next to be punished by Yeltsin, who has seen his popularity plummet as the transition from a state-run economy brought economic hardship to many ordinary Russians and left a trail of widespread corruption. (Latwp)
3.3. Elided words in exophoric reference With no elided word occurring in the text, it can be difficult to ascertain the exact reference of exophoric ellipsis. Nevertheless, in 34 of the 54 tokens of last and next whose elided words have exophoric reference, the noun one or its plural ones can easily replace the elided words, e.g. (26) and (27), as with all the tokens of anaphoric and cataphoric ellipsis discussed above4: (26)
‘‘They always are the last to join the parade,’’ Etzioni said.
(Latwp)
(27)
With Chile welcomed last Tuesday as a new associate member, Bolivia in the wings and Venezuela likely to be the next in line, Mercosur has exceeded all predictions made when the original framework was signed six years ago and is now recognized as one of the most dynamic trading blocs in the world. (Latwp)
The nouns one or ones cannot replace the elided words in the remaining 20 tokens of elliptical last. The elided word in seven of them, however, is replaceable with the noun time, e.g. (28): (28)
The last I looked, the statue of justice had only a blindfold. Not earplugs.
(Latwp)
The other 13 tokens seem highly idiomatic as there do not seem to be any appropriate nouns that could be used in place of the elided words, most of which are followed by an of-prepositional phrase, e.g. (29) and (30): (29)
‘‘We probably have not seen the last of Mr. Forbes,’’ Lichtman said.
(Latwp)
(30)
‘‘You idiots haven’t heard the last of this,’’ the vegetable doctor vowed.
(Latwp)
Thus, as can be seen in Table 3 below, most instances of exophoric ellipsis involving last and next can be interpreted without much difficulty as about three-fourths of such tokens (41 of the 54 tokens, 76%) can be understood simply by replacing the elided words with one(s) or time. Table 3[31_TD$IF] Elided words in exophoric ellipsis.
Replaceable One(s) Time Idiomatic Total
Last
Next
Total
30 7 13 50
4 0 0 4
34 7 13 54
4 Of the 34 tokens in which one or ones can replace the elided words, 24 tokens have human reference, e.g. (26), while 10 have non-human reference, e.g. (27). When the elided word calls for a human interpretation, a noun more specific than one—such as king, leader, official, member, senator, or child—can replace the elided word. When the elided word calls for a non-human interpretation, the following nouns can be used instead of the general noun one: country, episode, trip, beam, movie, item, or city.
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4. Types of word preceding the elliptical last and next There are three types of words that can precede elliptical last and next: central determiners, the null article, and possessive NP constructions. As postdeterminers, last and next can be preceded by all three types of central determiners: articles, demonstrative determiners, and possessive determiners (Biber et al., 1999:258). Followed by temporal nouns such as week, month, and year, the postdeterminers last and next can also combine with the null article (Yoo, 2007a,b, 2008). Unlike the zero article 11—the most indefinite article preceding mass nouns and plural count nouns, e.g. (31)—the null article 12, ‘‘being the most definite article,’’ combines with ‘‘singular proper nouns and some singular common nouns,’’ e.g. (32) (Yoo, 2008:41): (32)
Athena loves 11 milk and 11 cookies.
(Latwp)
(31)
12 Matthew was 12 best man at my wedding.
(Latwp)
Of the 371 tokens of elliptical last, 326 (87.9%) are preceded by a central determiner and 43 (11.6%) by the null article.5 The remaining two are preceded by a possessive NP construction, e.g. (33): (33)
[B]oth will be justified in declaring the summit, perhaps Yeltsin’s last, a historic one for nuclear disarmament.
(Latwp)
As Table 4 shows below, the 165 tokens of elliptical next show almost the same distribution as those of elliptical last as 146 (88.5%) are preceded by a central determiner and 19 (11.5%) by the null article. No tokens of elliptical next are preceded by a possessive NP construction.
Table 4[32_TD$IF] Three types of word preceding elliptical last and next. Last
Possessive NPs The Null Article Central Determiners Total
Next
Tokens
Percentage
Tokens
Percentage
2 43 326 371
0.5% 11.6% 87.9% 100%
0 19 146 165
0.0% 11.5% 88.5% 100%
4.1. The null article 12 Of the 43 tokens of 12 last in the 1996 Latwp corpus,[13_TD$IF] 19 tokens occur in headlines, e.g. (34), and five in titles, e.g. (35), in both of which omitting articles is a well-established convention6: (34)
Deputies Find Last of 6 Abducted Boarders
(35)
Matt strode down the aisle as the theme song from ‘‘Rocky’’ filled the church. Minutes later, the theme song from ‘‘Last of the Mohicans’’ played and in floated Knox, wearing an ankle-length gown adorned with applique daisies. (Latwp)
(Latwp)
The remaining 19 tokens of last all occur after a preposition or a conjunction—such as before, after, than, and, or, and as— e.g. (36), and so do 18 of the 19 tokens of next, e.g. (37):
5
The Brown Corpus contains no tokens of elliptical last occurring with the null article and only one such token of next in (15). It is interesting to note that only the first article is omitted in ‘‘Last of the Mohicans.’’ Initial position, in general, seems to be susceptible to ellipsis, as can also be seen in the examples of situational ellipsis in (1). Another running text found in the same corpus retains the first definite article in the same title, a variation also observed with the title[36_TD$IF] ‘‘(The) Last of Red Hot Lover[37_TD$IF]s’’: 6
(iv)
Whatever the film’s violence ratios, the Indians in the piece outsmart the Anglos and Mexicans at virtually every turn. The very clever Buffalo Hump is played by Eric Schweig, who was Uncas in ‘‘The Last of the Mohicans.’’
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(36)
Kurt Barnard, president of Barnard’s Retail Marketing Report, said many consumers’ expectations have been scaled back in the past few years, dampening their enthusiasm to spend money. ‘‘We are on record predicting this Christmas will be better than last, but in a modest way,’’ Barnard said. (Latwp)
(37)
Economists say the out-of-work number may well pass the psychologically important 4 million mark this month or next. (Latwp)
Another commonality is that their elided word is always a singular temporal noun, such as Christmas, season, week, month, and year. Likewise, the elided word in the remaining token of next in (38), which does not occur after a preposition or a conjunction, is also a singular temporal noun: (38)
How do I love you, Mother? Let me count the, uh, days, hours, minutes, seconds to Mother’s Day and not forget to send a card. (Relax. It’s not this Sunday, it’s next.) (Latwp)
The finding that the elided words in all these tokens of last and next are singular temporal nouns is in accordance with the fact that only singular temporal nouns can follow 12 last/next—for example, last week and next year, but *last book and *next months (Yoo, 2007a,b, 2008). The Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary (2006:807), however, states that expressions such as the election before last and the leader before last, along with the night before last, can ‘‘refer to the period of time, event, or person that came immediately before the most recent one in a series’’ and provides the following example: (39)
In the budget before last a tax penalty on the mobile phone was introduced.
The 1996 New York Times News Syndicate (NYT), with over 120 million words, does indeed contain three similar expressions, e.g. (40), but such expressions seem extremely rare as the 1996 Wall Street Journal (WSJ), with over 20 million words, does not generate any examples of the sort: (40)
‘‘The game before last (a 1-0 loss to Tampa Bay), we played very well but couldn’t put the ball in the goal,’’ Burn coach Dave Dir said. (NYT)
Interestingly, the same dictionary limits the use of after next only to ‘‘a period of time,’’ e.g. the week after next (Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary, 2006:963).7 Indeed, no tokens of ‘‘non-temporal noun + after next’’ is found in the 1996 Latwp, the 1996 NYT, or the 1996 WSJ. It is not, however, inconceivable to think of an example in which after next is used to refer to an event or a person, as is before last in (39) and (40) above: (41)
The one after next will be an Elvis song.
Compare (41) with the two examples of after the next found in the 1996 Lawtp corpus: (42)
One after the next, the songs come. ‘‘Yes It Is’’ to ‘‘Yesterday’’ to ‘‘It’s Only Love’’ to ‘‘Norwegian Wood’’; ‘‘Taxman’’ to ‘‘Penny Lane’’ to ‘‘Lucy in the Sky’’ to ‘‘Lady Madonna.’’ (Latwp)
(43)
‘‘The will was becoming involved with things it had not been concerned with since it was born,’’ sitting, standing, putting on galoshes, walking one effortful step after the next. (Latwp)
One obvious difference between the one after next in (41) and one after the next in (42) is the position of the definite article. A less obvious difference between the two is the difference in meaning; more specifically, the one after next has a specific reference, whereas one after the next, synonymous with one after another, has a general one. Undoubtedly, this difference in meaning comes from the absence of the before one in (42), but at first blush, it is unclear why there should be a difference in article usage before next also. Being the most definite article in English, the null article is used to provide the ‘‘insider’s’’ view, while the definite article, being the second most definite article, provides the ‘‘outsider’s’’ view (Chesterman, 1991:29). For example, in referring to the game that was played before the last game in (40), the last game, which is closer to the insider’s view, is preceded by the null 7 Also intriguing is the fact that the Collins COBUILD English Usage (2004:264) mentions only ‘‘the period of time’’ as possible reference for the expression after last: ‘‘You use before last to refer to the period of time immediately before the most recent one of its kind. For example, the year before last means ‘the year before last year.’’’
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article, and the game before the last game, which is closer to the outsider’s view, is preceded by the definite article, hence the phrase the game before 12 last. Likewise, if we assume that the referent of (the) next (song) in (41) is, say, a Beatles song, then the Beatles song is closer to the insider’s view than the Elvis song that comes after it and is thus referred to by 12 next. Following the Beatles song, the Elvis song is further away from the insider’s view and is thus referred to by a less definite article, i.e. the[F]I$DT8_1 +[F]I$DT9_1 one. 4.2. Central determiners before last and next Of the three types of central determiners—i.e. articles, demonstrative determiners, and possessive determiners—the definite article precedes the vast majority of elliptical last (300 of 326 tokens, 92%), while possessives precede 23 (7%) of the remaining 26 tokens, e.g. (44): (44)
A $1 million, 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl intoned: ‘‘Enjoy the Super Bowl . . . it may be your last.’’ (Latwp)
Two of the remaining three tokens are preceded by the indefinite article, e.g. (45), and the last remaining one by the demonstrative determiner this, in (46): (45)
More than a decade later, Lake came up with criteria that were both less demanding and less universal. He agreed that diplomacy should be a first resort, but he did not insist that force be a last. (Lawtp)
(46)
Three lesser glassworks also marketed flasks: Baltimore Flint Glass Works (1828-1834); Maryland Glass Works (1849-1862), and Spring Garden Glass Works (1851-1890), this last a Baltimore Glass Works offshoot. (Latwp)
As can be seen in Table 5 below, except only one token—preceded by the possessive his, in (47)—all the other 145 tokens of next combine with the definite article; no indefinite article or demonstratives are found before elliptical next: (47)
It’s safe to say that, despite his enormous success as a screenwriter Price thinks of himself primarily as a novelist. His first was the much acclaimed ‘‘The Wanderers’’ (later a Philip Kaufman film). His next? A story inspired by the Susan Smith case. Rudin’s already bought the rights, which means the novelist’s film work will continue for some time. (Lawtp)
Table 5[3_TD$IF] Central determiners before elliptical last and next. Last
Articles Definite Indefinite Possessives Demonstratives Total
Next
Tokens
Percentage
Tokens
Percentage
300 2 23 1 326
92.0% 0.6% 7.1% 0.3% 100%
145 0 1 0 146
99.3% 0.0% 0.7% 0.0% 100%
4.3. Triggers serving as anchors for locating elided words The 146 tokens of elliptical next preceded by a central determiner show an interesting characteristic that the 326 tokens of last do not, i.e. the elided words in more than two thirds of the tokens (103 of the 146 tokens) are preceded by the word one, e.g. (48), giving rise to the ‘‘one NP . . . the next (NP)’’ construction: (48)
The late physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel prize in 1954 for his theory of the quantum mechanics of the motion of an atomic particle, said ‘‘the physics of one era is the metaphysics of the next.’’ (Latwp)
This strong correlation between one and elliptical next makes it seem as though the elliptical use of next is ‘‘triggered’’ by one. The elided words in 25 tokens are also preceded by other triggers such as each, e.g. (49), and this, e.g. (50); the elided words in the remaining 18 tokens of next are not preceded by any triggers: (49)
Each cup must be absorbed before the next is added.
(Latwp)
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(50)
‘‘‘Exhale’ could act as a trigger,’’ he says. ‘‘Since the black community found this movie so satisfying, it will be on the lookout for the next.’’ (Latwp)
In the 326 tokens of elliptical last preceded by a central determiner, on the other hand, the absence of a trigger before the elided word is a common occurrence, exhibiting almost an exact mirror image of the distribution of the tokens of next occurring with or without a trigger. As shown in Table 6 below, the elided words in over 87% of the 326 tokens of last are not preceded by a trigger. Table 6[34_TD$IF] Elliptical last and next occurring with or without a trigger. Last
Trigger No Trigger Total
Next
Tokens
Percentage
Tokens
Percentage
40 286 326
12.3% 87.7% 100%
128 18 146
87.7% 12.3% 100%
Accounting for 45% of the 40 tokens of elliptical last preceded by a trigger, first is the most common trigger occurring before the elided words of elliptical last, e.g. (51); unlike one, which is used only in conjunction with elliptical next, first precedes the elided words of both elliptical last and elliptical next, e.g. (52): (51)
It was the first time I’d heard the word ‘‘heal’’ outside of church. Of course, it wasn’t the last, as that word is now applied to everything from childhoods to bad marriages to rogue presidents. (Latwp)
(52)
And with the series’ ratings deteriorating like the orbit of a plummeting spacecraft, NBC considered canceling ‘‘Star Trek’’ at the end of that first year, and again the next, and finally pulled the plug in February 1969. (Latwp)
As can be seen in Table 7 below, each and this are also used as triggers for both last and next, e.g. (53)[24_TD$IF]–(56): (53)
Throughout the history of capital punishment, each new killing device has been hailed at its introduction as more modern and less barbaric than the last, and lethal injection is no exception. (Latwp)
(54)
The worst is not having an assignment, or pulling a dull one like guard duty. Then each hour bleeds into the next and soldiers can think of only one thing: home. (Latwp)
(55)
Perot doesn’t wear well. Our sense is that he may not have nor deserve to have the impact this time around that he had the last. (Latwp)
(56)
Jim made a 45-degree turn with this picture and he’ll probably make another 45-degree turn with the next two. (Latwp)
The fact that these triggers are used with both elliptical last and elliptical next clearly means that they do not cause the elliptical use of last or next per se. Rather, they serve as a mere signal, however weak (each, first, and this) or strong (one), indicating that elliptical last or next might follow. They also serve as an anchor that allows the reader to quickly Table 7[35_TD$IF] Triggers used with elliptical last and next. Last
Each First One This Total
Next
Tokens
Percentage
Tokens
Percentage
12 18 0 10 40
30.0% 45.0% 0.0% 25.0% 100%
7 5 103 13 128
5.5% 3.9% 80.5% 10.1% 100%
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locate the elided word in the text, thus facilitating the reader’s comprehension of the text by way of increasing its cohesion.8 5. Conclusion This paper has examined some elliptical patterns involving two post-determiners, last and next, which sometimes assume other functions including pronominal-like ones. Interestingly enough, they still exhibit more lexical properties than a typical pronoun, given that both last and next often need to be accompanied by a central determiner. In analyzing the structure and functions of last and next in elliptical constructions, we see a sequencing and additive modifier in prenominal position being reinterpreted as the referential head (unless of course we assume an empty head noun, as posited by some formal syntactic accounts). In this respect, we see a phenomenon that is not unlike the nominal use of adjectivals in expressions such as the rich, which is derived from the fuller nominal expression the rich ones or the rich people. Just as the elided words in most instances of elliptical last and next can be replaced with one(s), so the elided elements in the nominal use of adjectivals (e.g. ones and people) are generic referents that are easily retrieved from shared knowledge among interlocutors. The choice of the determiner used (or not used) with elliptical last and next constructions also contributes to the (in) definiteness interpretation of the nominal referent. In particular, the use of the null article 12 in expressions such as the game before 12 last and the one after 12 next support the argument that there is a strong tendency for the use of null to be associated with an ‘‘insider’s’’ viewpoint, while the use of the definite article is strongly associated instead with a more distant ‘‘outsider’s’’ viewpoint (Chesterman, 1991). A close examination of the 581 tokens of elliptical last and next found in the Brown Corpus and the 1996 Latwp corpus has also revealed that they fall into one of the following three categories[25_TD$ IF]—conventional (the elided word situated exophorically and understood conventionally), proximal textual (the elided word and elliptical last/next occurring within the same clause), and distal textual (the elided word and elliptical last/next occurring across clausal boundaries)—and that proximal textual ellipsis is most common for both elliptical last and elliptical next (74% and 83%, respectively) (see Table 1). The 536 tokens of elliptical last and next retrieved from the 1996 Latwp corpus have been further analyzed to determine (1) reference strategies for identifying the elided words, (2) types of words preceding last and next, and (3) the presence of triggers for elliptical last and next, the results of which are summarized as follows. First, the elided word is most often found anaphorically to elliptical last and next (66% and 96%, respectively). Although cataphoric reference is rather common with elliptical last (21%), compared with only 2% with elliptical next, most elided words occur soon after the mention of the last within the same phrase, e.g. the last of his children, a pattern generally found with any cataphoric referent (see Table 2). In most cases of exophoric reference, the noun one or its plural ones can replace the elided word (see Table 3). Second, elliptical last and next can be preceded by either a central determiner, the null article 12, or a possessive NP, of which the central determiners combine with the vast majority of the tokens of elliptical last and next (88% and 89%, respectively) (see Table 4). Preceded by the null article, elliptical last and next often occur after a preposition or a conjunction, e.g. this month or 12 next, and the elided word in such a construction is usually a singular temporal noun. Of the three central determiners—articles, possessives, and demonstratives—the definite article combines with the vast majority of the tokens of elliptical last and next (92% and 99%, respectively) (see Table 5). Lastly, elliptical next is much more likely to be preceded by a trigger such as one, this, or each in a preceding NP than is elliptical last (88% and 12%, respectively) (see Table 6). One being the most common form, triggers serve as anchors that allow the reader to quickly locate the elided words in the text, thus facilitating the reader’s comprehension of the text by way of increasing the cohesion of the text (see Table 7).9 In sum, this paper has identified several nominal properties associated with elliptical constructions involving last and next, which may also serve as a point of departure for future research studies. According to Biber et al. (1999:280), there are ‘‘four major pairings of semi-determiners,’’ which are often described as adjectives but ‘‘have no descriptive meaning and primarily serve to specify the reference of the noun’’: (a) same and other; (b) former and latter; (c) last and next; and (d) certain and such. Biber et al. (1999:281–282) also point out that these semi-determiners, except certain, can function as pronouns but do not separate the semi-determiners from their pronominal uses in the quantitative survey of their distribution among different genres ‘‘as determiner and pronoun uses of the same forms are closely related.’’ However, the findings reported in this study clearly show that much can be gained from investigating the ‘‘pronoun,’’ or elliptical, uses of the semi-determiners last and next, and similar research studies on the elliptical uses of the other semi-determiners could just as well generate valuable findings that can help us better understand a category of nominal elements that are neither 8 This unique property of triggers, i.e. assisting the reader to locate the elided word, is also observed with an indefinite pronoun accompanying else, e.g. anything in anything else. According to Yap and Celce-Murcia (2000:155), in utterances such as Hudson knew he had to use these men as long as he remained an explorer. And he refused to be anything else, the word else ‘‘relies on the mediation of the accompanying indefinite pronoun anything to anchor onto’’ an explorer and ‘‘from there to bounce off in an obviative fashion to identify the intended and true referent, which is ‘other than an explorer.’’’ 9 Admittedly, the total number of tokens of the elliptical uses examined in this paper, as well as the size of the corpora from which those tokens were retrieved, can be considered relatively small—especially the tokens of elided words in exophoric ellipsis and triggers used with elliptical last and next, whose numbers are presented in Tables 3 and 7, respectively. As with any corpus findings based on the analysis of a small number of tokens, findings discussed with respect to these tokens should be taken not as generalizations but as observed patterns that need to be corroborated by further research.
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fully lexical nor fully pronominal, yet whose usage within a nominal construction without an overt head noun is nevertheless fully referential. References Biber, Douglas, Conrad, Susan, Reppen, Randi, 1998. Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge University Press, New York. Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan, Finegan, Edward, 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman, London. Carter, Ronald, McCarthy, Michael, 2006. Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Chesterman, Andrew, 1991. On Definiteness: A Study with Special Reference to English and Finnish. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary 5th ed. Harper Collins Publishers, Glasgow. Collins COBUILD English Grammar 2nd ed. Harper Collins Publishers, Glasgow. Collins COBUILD English Usage 2nd ed. Harper Collins Publishers, Glasgow. Halliday, M.A.K., Hasan, Ruqaiya, 1976. Cohesion in English. Longman, New York. Hacker, Diana, 2009. A Writer’s Reference, 6th ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston. Huddleston, Rodney, PullumF Geoffrey K., 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hunston, Susan, 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kennedy, Graeme, 1998. An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. Addison Wesley Longman, New York. Longman Dictionary of English Language and CultureLongman, London. Meyer, Charles F., 2002. English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 6th ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Reppen, Randi, Ide, Nancy, 2004. The American national corpus: overall goals and the first release. Journal of English Linguistics 32 (2), 105–113. Yap, Foong Ha, Celce-Murcia, Marianne, 2000. The grammar, meaning, and referential functions of else. English Language and Linguistics 4, 137–181. Yoo, Isaiah WonHo, 2007a. Definite article usage before last/next time in spoken and written American English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12 (1), 83–105. Yoo, Isaiah WonHo, 2007b. Five factors in interpreting the last decade/century and the next decade/century in American English. Journal of Pragmatics 39 (9), 1526–1546. Yoo, Isaiah WonHo, 2008. A corpus analysis of (the) last/next + temporal nouns. Journal of English Linguistics 36 (1), 39–61. Isaiah WonHo Yoo is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Sogang University, where he teaches graduate-level applied linguistics/TESOL courses and undergraduate-level linguistics/EFL courses. After an undergraduate psychology education at UC Berkeley, he earned a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from UCLA and taught EAP for three years at MIT. His primary research focuses on how corpus linguistics informs language pedagogy and how definiteness is expressed in English and other languages such as Korean, Japanese, and Chinese.