Analysis of the Problems in the Usage of Verb Phrase Ellipsis for Undergraduate Students of Hazara Region

Abstract

This study investigates the challenges faced by undergraduate English language learners in Hazara region in using elliptical constructions such as verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), including gapping and sluicing. Ellipsis, as an economy-driven grammatical phenomenon, plays a central role in natural discourse but remains underexplored in Pakistani EFL context. The primary objectives of this research were to examine the accuracy and error patterns in learners’ use of these constructions, to identify the influence of instructional gaps and structural complexity, and to propose pedagogical strategies for improvement. The samples were collected from two hundred and eighty-six participants enrolled in different universities of Hazara region at undergraduate level. They were administered diagnostic grammar tasks that assessed VPE, gapping, and sluicing in controlled written tasks. The answers given by the learners were contrasted and compared with the native samples of the British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings revealed the existence of an apparent rank of competence, that VPE had been marginally the most robust category that had moderate accuracy, that sluicing had been partially learned, but that recoverability had been an issue and gapping had been the worst-behaving category in regards to avoidance rates. Patterns in errors suggested that there is low coverage of ellipsis in the curricula and low frequency of input in natural texts. Such pedagogical implications include the explicit teaching of grammar, training in parallelism, training in discourse, and materials based on corpus. The study adds to the existing literature on syntactic acquisition in Pakistani EFL learners and the value of introducing more sophisticated grammar phenomena in a controlled manner to increase communicative competence.

Key Words: Elliptical Constructions, VPE, Gapping, Sluicing, EFL, BNC, COCA

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19922589