Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis and its Varieties in Spoken German: A Study with the TüBa-D/S Treebank of the VERBMOBIL Corpus

Grammar rules for Clausal Coordinate Ellipsis (CCE) are based nearly exclusively on linguistic judgments (intuitions). For German, the extent to which grammar rules based on this type of empirical evidence generate all and only CCE structures that populate text corpora, has only been explored with the TIGER treebank of written newspaper text. How well these rules fit spoken German is unknown. In this paper, we study the applicability of judgment-based CCE rules to spontaneously spoken German by means of the TüBa-D/S treebank, which is based on dialogues for appointment scheduling and travel planning from the VERBMOBIL project. The judgment-based CCE rules are shown to hold nearly equally well for spoken as for written text: The proportion of deviations from the rules are virtually identical—less than 3% of the utterances/sentences that include a clausal coordination (compared to about 1% in the TIGER treebank). Moreover, the relative frequencies in VERBMOBIL of four main CCE types distinguished in the literature reveal a pattern that resembles the pattern observed in CGN2.0, the Corpus of Spoken Dutch.