Verb phrase ellipsis is an occurrence in the English language which covers the omission of the entire verb phrase or one or more elements of the verb phrase. It is introduced most commonly by an auxiliary or modal verb, it can operate in coordinate and subordinate sentences, and can be influenced by inversion as well. As a polyvalent phenomenon, several special instances of it can be found in linguistics, such as antecedent-contained ellipsis and argument-contained ellipsis. Previous research on the topic dealt mainly with detection, identification and resolution of verb phrase ellipsis, but this corpus-based study deals with investigating the frequency of syntactic elements and backgrounds in which the occurrence can take place. The findings demonstrated that verb phrase ellipsis uses pronouns more frequently than nouns as the subjects, appears more often in subordinate clauses, where they are introduced by modal verbs more commonly than by auxiliaries.