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.

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Instead of directly addressing "ellipsis" in the main title, Evelyn Gandón-Chapela describes this linguistic phenomenon as "invisible language" colloquially and vividly. However, readers may be misled by the title of the book "On Invisible Language in Modern English -A Corpus-based Approach to Ellipsis", which in fact only concentrates on the post-auxiliary ellipsis (PAE) rather than the overall ellipsis in Modern English. PAE covers ellipsis cases in which a verb phrase, prepositional phrase, noun phrase, adjective phrase, or adverbial phrase is omitted after one of the following licensors: modal auxiliaries, auxiliaries be, have, and do, and infinitival marker to. Concretely, the book discusses two main sub-types of PAE, namely verb-phrase ellipsis (VP-Ellipsis) and pseudo-gapping (PG). See examples(1) and (2) as follows for further illustration, respectively:(1) I have [eaten an apple] this morning, but Mary hasn't eaten an apple.(2) Peter [kissed] Daisy, and Paul did kiss Nancy.Example (1) of VP-Ellipsis shows the omission of the VP triggered by the licensor have. The elided VP antecedent (eaten an apple) is highlighted by square brackets. Though example (2) is close to the structure of example (1), in PG, there would be a complement left after the auxiliary, as the directly object Nancy after the licensor did.In all, the book stands out among other ellipsis-related volumes for its qualitative discussions accompanied by quantitative analysis. With this work, Dr. Gandón-Chapela conducted the first sustained diachronic corpus investigation towards PAE. Aiming to provide an empirical account for PAE, this book not only reports the descriptive overview of PAE in the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern English (PPCME) but also compares its results with former corpus studies. What is noteworthy is that the book presents a new series of algorithms for automatically detecting and retrieving PAE from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern English. Retrieving a considerable amount of PAE accurately has always been a premise for quantitative research on the ellipsis phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is not easy Dai Book review: On Invisible Language in Modern English Glottometrics 52, 2022 66