- 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
We have evidence from the data that young second-language learners are also gradually acquiring discourse ellipsis, but some of our examples are less clear because they co-occur
with addition, misformation or misordering errors. Shazia: Subject and Verb Ellipsis
The example below, from Shazia’s Story E, is a clear case of ellipsis; the missing items “he was” carry a very low information load and the utterance as a whole gives the reason for
the previous happening: hurt
20 Billy do his back again.
21 Um a long time on horse.
Aqeel: Subject and Auxiliary Ellipsis Aqeel’s example, from Story B2, possibly requires a wider application of the term context,
to include situational context as well as textual context, or co-text: 1
Once upon a time there was Father Christmas 2
and there was mess. 3
And he saw boxes. 4
There was footballs inside. 5
He said,
6 “What I do now?” - - -
7 And he went to London.
8 And he - and the lady - - -
9 The Father Christmas said,
- 200 - 10
“What do with these balls?” 11
“ go to football.” 12
When they went to football 13
it was on 14
and…they, all the team was making plans. In 10 “shall I” is ellipted but is recoverable from 6 if, in 6, the omitted “shall” a
grammatical omission error is first inserted. Utterance 6 cannot be unequivocally interpreted as a question without “shall” because the intonation does not help, and he
breaks off before the next utterance and could have intended something like “What I do now is to go to London”. In order to interpret 11 as the hortative “Let’s go to football”, rather
than the imperative “Go to football”, we look at 12; the hortative is the only interpretation which would take the event line forward to 12 from “the lady’s” answering suggestion. We
might well question whether a child who had not heard the original would have been able to process the data in this way; our answer is “possibly” because this is the most obvious
way to make sense of the piece, and hearers do make conscious efforts to decode the utterances they hear.
Fehdah: Subject and Auxiliary Ellipsis Fehdah’s example from Story F is clear because only one participant has been introduced
and so the ellipted items “he would” must, of necessity, apply to him: 1
One day Mr. Wong was um - very annoyed 2
because he didn’t like Tableland. 3
never ever come back. The ellipsis is, therefore, legitimate, especially as it is reinforced by appropriate expressive
phonology and the emphasizer “ever”. Shazia: Subject Ellipsis
Shazia’s example from Story B is also unambiguous, though the narrative itself is incoherent. Her protagonist is Father Christmas:
1 Father Christmas look at box
and, after this briefest of introductions, he is thereafter referred to as “he”.
- 201 - 18
He look in the window. 19
He didn’t saw it. 20
and he didn’t go - 21
didn’t see them - - - 21 is problematic because she does not tell us what “it” and “them” refer to, not because
“he” is missing. Subject ellipsis of this kind is the most common form of ellipsis reported by Ingham 1992b.
We now return to two examples by Sakander and Humira discussed above pp. 179–180, where the use of ellipsis is not legitimate: Humira’s for semantic reasons and Sakander’s
because, although recoverable, the ellipsis is still ungrammatical. These add substance to Ingham’s 1992b claim that “a simple notion to the effect that ellipsis is allowed if the
missing” item “is contextually retrievable, either linguistically or non-linguistically Thomas 1979:45 cannot be a sufficient condition” p. 4; in our examples, both semantic and
syntactic restrictions are involved. Although second-language learners have to acquire the communicative competence to know when ellipsis is permissible and when it is not, this is
not just a matter of L2 competence but a universal and pragmatic issue. We have noted that some subjects have yet to grasp the importance of prior mention in discourse. Their
grammatical knowledge tells them that, in English as well as Panjabi, subjects are overtly expressed; but their growing discourse, or communicative, competence also tells them that,
if there is no change of subject, and it is clear from the co-text who he or she happens to be, then the understood subject may be ellipted in informal speech. This kind of ellipsis is
probably a universal tendency, differing only in details across languages. Other subjects, such as Sakander and Humira, discover later that verbs and auxiliaries may
also be ellipted under similar conditions, as long as the semantic andor syntactic restrictions allow it; these restrictions may be universal or language specific. On page 196
above we mentioned the need to distinguish between grammatical and discourse ellipsis, and asked how children learn to differentiate between the two kinds of competence,
grammatical and communicative, when the same input “drives the acquisition of both” Ingham 1992b:6. This problem has been posed by Valian 1991 and has yet to be
answered. After looking at the data, we can only conclude that the issue is multi-layered and that various factors are at work to determine acceptability: Ingham mentions
- 202 - formalinformal style, and phonological and syntactic factors; we, additionally, have
examples of semantic factors which prevent ellipsis from taking place legitimately.
5.5 Summary
We began the chapter with a few introductory remarks about the relationship between evaluation and event structure, or plot construction, and evaluation and the presence of
errors. We were able to provide some statistical evidence for the hypothesis that an evaluated narrative will also have a well-constructed event line, but NOT for the
hypothesis that an evaluated narrative will necessarily contain less errors. In fact, grammatical, phonological and lexical errors are seldom found to hinder otherwise good
communication significantly. We followed this by an in-depth quantitative comparison of evaluation and other related issues in the narratives of L1 and L2 subjects, concluding that
our L2 subjects use only about two thirds the amount of internal evaluation used by the L1 subjects. Discourse errors across the two groups of learners were then studied, both for
their similarities and their differences. We noted that while most L2 errors are developmental in origin, a few may be directly attributable to L2 status. We concluded with
a brief consideration of discourse ellipsis as a possible indicator of communicative competence.
In the next two chapters, we discuss the various evaluative devices in detail and seek to show, with specific examples, when a particular feature is used evaluatively and when it is
not. Chapter 6 deals with the Intensifier category and chapter 7 with Comparators, Correlatives and Explicatives, and also with External Evaluation.
