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 these, the missing words haven’t necessarily been mentioned, but they are clearly recoverable.
E.g. "The dark-haired girl (who is) standing over there just smiled at you."

Substitution
The easiest way to think about substitution is to consider it as a form of ellipsis. Something is missing, but instead of just leaving it out, we substitute it with another word, usually ‘so’, ‘one(s)’, ‘do(es)’, ‘did’. 
E.g. Replacing a noun (phrase):
"-What kind of cupcake would you like?" -" A chocolate one, please."
E.g. Replacing a verb phrase:
"I didn’t like the film, but everyone else did."
Note that we use substitution for verbs in the simple present or simple past. For other tenses or modals, we use ellipsis.
"I don’t want to go running but I really should"
"-Have you ever been to Paris?"  -"Yes, I have (been to Paris)"
Ellipsis and substitution also tend to come up as testable items in Use of English type exam papers. We often see multiple choice questions such as:
Susie doesn’t like coffee but I _____.
do
like
didn’t
I can’t play the piano but Jim _____.
does
is
can
Once you've finished reading the explanation above, follow these two links to get some practice done!
Do not forget to print your results to bring them to class. 
Good luck!






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