Essay On Ellipsis In English

2332 Words5 Pages

Ellipsis is a pervasive phenomenon in natural language.Since ellipsis is one of the different cohesive devices in English, its place will specify among other standards of textuality and its characteristics as a cohesive device.
Ellipsis in English involves the grammatical omission of a linguistic item as opposed to other types of omission in the language. Ellipsis is then different from ‘aphaeresis` which involves a phonological loss (the word because spelled cos); clipping of words as flu from influenza (the omission is in terms of phonological units i.e., syllables). It is also different from semantic omission where there is an implicit meaning which can be expressed, but in this case it is not possible to pin down in exact words the ellipted …show more content…

eg.: Bob loves Mary more than (Bob) loves his sister. INITIAL
In appended clauses “only part of the preceding or interrupted clause constitutes the ellipsis, and an additional clause constituent is present” Quirk et. al. (1973: 253). This could be illustrated with: They are meant to wound, perhaps to kill. i.e., they are meant to wound, they are meant perhaps to kill.
It is useful to have a clear idea about the concept of cohesion and precisely ellipsis among other standards of textuality in text linguistics. Text linguistics took as the objective of its studies the text beyond the sentence which became its end focus before dissatisfaction with sentence based grammar was expressed. The analyses of language were targeted to study communication rather than language far from its pragmatic …show more content…

al. (1976) emphasize not only the presence of the presupposing and the presupposed items within the same text, but also the distance between the two. They exclude the existence of any cohesive tie between a presupposing element inside the text and a presupposed element outside the text, i.e., in the situational context. As far as the cohesive tie which is established between elements within the same text, this appears to be a controversial issue. It is reasonable to assume that cohesion is established between elements at the inter- sentencial level, because the object of inquiry is the text. However, if we analyze the definition of the text we may change our view: “the word text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole” Halliday et. al. (ibid.:01). So, if the text is of whatever length, then a word or a clause or a sentence can form a text with a communicative goal. Halliday et. al. (ibid.) state that cohesion exists at the inter-sentencial level, and that it is more important than it is at the - 46 - intra-sentencial level because the grammatical units which are structured are inherently cohesive. However, they posit a condition for cohesion to be dealt with at the intra-sentencial level: “only when the two items, the presupposing and the presupposed happened to occur within the same sentence” Halliday et. al. (ibid.

Open Document