Ellipsis & Substitution in Linguistics
Ellipsis There are generally considered to be two different kinds of ellipsis, situational and textual. Situational ellipsis is, unsurprisingly, where the situation or context makes the missing element clear. It’s informal and mostly used in conversation. For example, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ can easily become ‘Tea?’ if you are waving a mug at someone, or even just sitting in the kitchen. Textual ellipsis has more grammatical ‘rules’, and can be found in both speech and writing. It could be defined as when we omit something that has already been mentioned (so doesn’t need to be repeated), or when what is missing is clearly recoverable from the text. E.g. " I went to the bakers to get some wholemeal rolls and (I went) to the butchers for lamb chops." Textual ellipsis is probably most commonly found in the second clause after ‘and’ or ‘but’ Reduced relative clauses and reduced adverbial clauses are also often considered to be examples of ellipsis. With...