Ellipsis Grammatical Cohesion Devices
Like substitution, ellipsis also has three types; they are nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, and clausal ellipsis.
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1 Nominal ellipsis
Nominal ellipsis is an ellipsis within the nominal group. For example: “Which hat will you wear? This is the best.”
In this case, hat as the common noun representing the thing that is omitted.
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The original sentence should be ‘which hat will you wear? This is the best hat’.
Halliday and Hasan state in their book “Cohesion in English” that nominal ellipsis consists of the elements Deictic, Numerative, and Epithet. The
Deictic is normally a determiner, the Numerative is a numeral or other quantifier,
and the Epithet is an adjective.
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1. Deictic. The word functioning as Deictic is normally the class of determiner. Deictic forms a relationship between determiners
demonstrative, possessive, indefinite determiners and related categories each, every, all, both, any, either, no, neither, some, a. The example is:
“The men got back at midnight. Both were tired out.” The word both functions elliptically. It refers back to two men. The word
ellipsis here is men.
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2. Numerative. Numerative element in the nominal group is showed by a numeral or other quantifying words which form three subcategories:
ordinal first, next, last, second, third, etc, cardinal one, two, three, four, five, etc, and indefinite quantifier many, much, more, most, few, several,
a little, lots, a bit, hundreds, etc. Cardinal numerals which are also frequent in ellipsis, can be preceded by any Deictic that is appropriate in
number, such as the seven, these three, any five, all seven etc.
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3. Epithet. The function of Epithet is expressed by an adjective. For example: “Apples are the cheapest in autumn.”
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Ibid., p. 146.
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Ibid., p. 149.
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Ibid., p. 147.
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Ibid., p. 155.
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Ibid., pp. 161-162.
In this sentence we may fairly ask “the cheapest what?” The cheapest is an elliptical group presupposing some item such as fruit. Hence, the word
ellipsis here is fruit.
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2 Verbal ellipsis
Verbal ellipsis is an ellipsis within the verbal group. For example is:
“Have you been swimming? Yes, I have.” The verbal group in the answer is have yes, I have is the instance of verbal
ellipsis . It stands for I have been swimming.
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In verbal ellipsis, there are two types; they are lexical ellipsis and operator ellipsis
. 1. Lexical ellipsis. It is the type of ellipsis which is the lexical verb is omitted
from the verbal group. However, all the modal operator such as can, could, will, would, shall, should, may, might, ought to and is to am to, is
to, are to, was to, were to cannot function as a lexical verb, just two other modal operators: need and dare, can be used as lexical verbs.
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Halliday and Hasan point out, “Lexical ellipsis is ellipsis ‘from the right’. It always
involves omission of the last word, which is the lexical verb, and may extend ‘leftward’, to leave only the first word intact.”
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It means that lexical ellipsis
is happened in the last word of the sentence and may continue to omit a word before. The example which is given by Halliday
and Hasan is in the following sentences:
“John should have been coming every day. I don’t think he has been coming.”
For ‘has been coming’, we may omit the word ‘coming’or ‘been coming’. Hence, the second sentence could be ‘I don’t think he has been’ or simply
‘I don’t think he has’ .
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Ibid., pp. 163-164.
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Ibid., p. 167.
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Ibid., p. 170.
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Ibid., p. 173.
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Ibid.
2. Operator ellipsis. Operator ellipsis is another type of verbal ellipsis. It also could be stated as ellipsis ‘from the left’ which means that operator
ellipsis involves only the omission of operator without omitting the lexical
verb . The example is:
“Some were laughing and others crying.” In this sentence, there is an omit word ‘were’ which is functioned as an
operator. The original sentence should be “Some were laughing and others
were crying”.
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3 Clausal ellipsis
Clausal ellipsis means an ellipsis within the clause. The clause in English is considered as the expression of the various speech functions, such as statement,
question, response, and so on, and has two parts of structure consisting of modal
element and propositional element. Modal element consists of speech function of
the clause such as Subject plus finite element in the verbal group. Besides, the remaining part of the verbal group is propositional element. Here is the example
of modal element and propositional element:
The Duke was going to plant a row of poplars in the park.
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modal element propositional element
Furthermore, it is an example of clausal ellipsis: ‘And how many hours a day did you do lessons?’ said Alice, in a hurry to
change the subject. ‘Ten hours the first day’ said the Mock Turtle: ‘nine the next, and so on.’
The two clauses nine the next and ten hours the first day representing we did lessons ten hours the first day,
etc.
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