L1 Examples of Ellipsis

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5.4.3 Ellipsis

The use of discourse ellipsis is a matter of style, and will normally only be employed in interactive situations and where missing items are recoverable from the context see quotation from Thomas 1979 on page 174. Ingham’s 1992b manuscript “Acquiring Subject Ellipsis in Discourse” raises the question: how does the child acquire discourse ellipsis? and concludes that it is by attending to regularities in input speech; exceptions are regarded as just “noise” in the data. He also discusses the fact that the same mechanism operates for both grammatical and discourse ellipsis; so how can children differentiate between the two, when one involves grammatical competence and the other communicative competence? This is 7a question we will come back to after looking at the data.

5.4.3.1 L1 Examples of Ellipsis

Adrian: Subject and Verb Ellipsis The following example from Story D occurs in answer to a question where it is totally unnecessary, as far as successful communication is concerned, for the subject and verb to be repeated: 1 Father Christmas was so sad 2 because he wasn’t feeling well. - - - [What did he need?] 3 to go to bed. 4 And he went to sleep 5 and dreamed all about his holidays. However, we might argue that the story narration was a formal situation, and that the conversational interlude was an interruption; an experienced storyteller might well choose not to respond directly to the prompting and carry on hisher narrative as if it had not occurred, i.e.: 3 He decided to go to bed. Interestingly, the rest of the story is quite fluent and there are no more interactional exchanges. - 197 - Matthew: Ellipsis of All Recoverable Information Matthew’s Story D, which was excluded from the data because it contained only one narrative clause, is, however an excellent example of the operation of ellipsis in question and answer couplets: [Who is the story about?] 1 Father Christmas not The story was about Father Christmas [And what was his friend’s name?] 2 Walter [That’s right And why was Father Christmas all fed up and cross?] 3 because he didn’t want the children 4 to have their Christmas [Why didn’t he? What did he want?] 5 to go on a holiday [That’s right He wanted to go on holiday. So how did he have his holiday?] 6 by putting on a disguise [What happened for Christmas - instead of presents and things?] 7 They played with the snow. [That’s right Who organized it?] 8 Walter [That’s right And they played in the snow, didn’t they? Was there anything special about the snow?] 9 It was magic. [What did Walter feel like at the end of Christmas?] 10 Tired [That’s right So what did Father Christmas do for him?] 11 Let him 12 to go on a holiday. [That’s right And where did he go to?] 13 Australia - 198 - [ That’s right And when did he go? When it was…] 14 Snowing [Do you remember?] 15 Melted [No, he didn’t melt, though you’d expect him to because it was summer. Why was it he didn’t melt? Do you remember that? - - - Father Christmas asked the fairies to make a spell, didn’t he?] In all, Matthew gives 15 minimal responses; he ellipts everything that can be ellipted. Only two of the answers are grammatically complete, but in every case bar one the antecedents of the ellipted words are found in the preceding question. However, his final reply is only meaningful if the hearer has heard the original version; “melted” does not follow on from the question, which anticipates an affirmative answer and some details of the circumstances surrounding the events being questioned, and so is not a genuine case of ellipsis, but a discourse error and a violation of Grice’s Maxim of Quantity see chapter 2, p. 50. Nina: Object Ellipsis Nina’s example, from Story A, occurs in a conversational passage and the ellipsis passes almost unnoticed: 47 “Father Christmas Who’s Father Christmas?” 48 said Mr. Wong. 49 “He’s a person 50 who makes children happy 51 and gives them presents 52 and what they want. 53 See they write notes to him 54 and he sends 55 and he gives them presents on Christmas Eve.” If we had not listened to the tape recording, we would have said that this was just a simple repair where she corrects herself and changes “sends” to “gives”; but the passage is remarkably fluent and she clearly intends the expression “sends and gives” because the two are linked phonologically. - 199 - Thomas 1979 deals with “ellipsis and transitivity”, and subcategorizes transitive verbs “into those allowing ellipsis, those insisting on object-manifestation, and a third subcategory” which he calls “‘reflexive’ object elision” pp. 54–55. Here “send” allows ellipsis only because it is linked to the verb “give” which has two objects in both 51 and 55; we know from 50 that the indirect object “them” refers to “children” as recipients and, from the general context, that the direct object of “send” is “things which make suitable gifts for young children”.

5.4.3.2 L2 Examples of Ellipsis