The paper focuses on which role is given to elided sentence participants in coreference chains, i.e. whether (and to which degree) the participants that are present only implicitly in the surface layer are involved in relations of textual and grammatical coreference. Generally, the paper introduces the methods how it is possible to examine the interplays of different language phenomena in corpus data of the Prague Dependency Tree-bank containing multilayer annotation.
It is only the aid of large corpora (several billions of words) that enables us to discover some intuitively and spontaneously followed rules of grammar. Different kinds of ellipsis and non-ellipsis (repetition of a word or a nominal phrase, which - under some conditions - can be omitted) can also be governed by such rules. The corpus findings of sentence structures as (1) Zastavila se a podívala se na hodinky or (2) Zastavila se a podívala na hodinky (She stopped and looked at her watch) have clearly shown that ellipsis as well as repetition is a (strict) rule under specific semantic and syntactic conditions.