Subject Ellipsis in English: Construction of and Findings from a Diary Corpus

Subject ellipsis is not typically considered to be a common occurrence in English, although it has been studied within certain genres of text, including personal diaries. The current paper explores English subject ellipsis in a diary corpus that has been constructed from online weblogs (blogs). The pronouns I and it were found to be the most frequently omitted subjects and their identities were usually recoverable from preceding linguistic information. Both main verbs and auxiliary verbs were used by authors in sentence initial position, with HAVE, BE, and GET being the most common. Also discussed is the privacy of these personal, yet public, journals. Results are similar to those found for studies of subject ellipsis in casual letters, but are suggestive of differences based on authorial intentions and the intended audience.