A comparison of clausal coordinate ellipsis in Estonian and German: remarkably similar elision rules allow a language-independent ellipsis-generation module

  • Authors:
  • Karin Harbusch;Mare Koit;Haldur Õim

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany;University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia;University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

  • Venue:
  • EACL '09 Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations Session
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We compare the phenomena of clausal coordinate ellipsis in Estonian, a Finno-Ugric language, and German, an Indo-European language. The rules underlying these phenomena appear to be remarkably similar. Thus, the software module Elleipo, which was originally developed to generate clausal coordinate ellipsis in German and Dutch, works for Estonian as well. In order to extend Elleipo's coverage to Estonian, we only had to adapt the lexicon and some syntax rules unrelated to coordination. We describe the language-independent rules for coordinate ellipsis that Elleipo applies to non-elliptical syntactic structures in both target languages.