Chapter 4 Ellipsis 4-1 Ellipsis, substitution and reference In one sense. the break between Chapters 3 and 4 is an unnatural one, be- cause substitution and ellipsis are very similar to each other. As we ex- pressed it earlier, ellipsis is simply • substitution by zero~. For practic.il purposes, however, it is more helpfUl to treat the two separately. Although substitution and ellipsis embody the same funda- mental relation between parts of a text (a relation between words or groups or clauses- as distinct from reference. which is a relation between mean- ings), they are two different kinds of structural mechanism, and hence show rather different patterns. The starting point of the discussion of ellipsis can be the familiar notion that it is • something left unsaid'. There is no implication here that what is unsaid is not rmderstood; on the contrary. 'unsaid' implies • but nnderstood nevertheless', and another way of referring to ellipsis is in fact as sOME- THING UNDERSTOOD, where understood is used in the special sense of • going without saying• {compare it is understood that we are to 1K comulted before any agreement is reached). There is no mystery in the fact that much can be • understood' in this way. As we have itressed all atong. language does not function in isola- tion; it functions as TEXT, in actJ1al situations of use. There is always a great dea1 more evidence available to the hearer for interpreting a sentence than is contained in the sentence itsel£ However. it is important here to distinguish between two different kinds of evidence from which we may {to use another familiar term) ·supply' what is left unsaid. Only one of these is associated with ellipsis: that where there is some presupposition. in the structure, of what is to be supplied, Consider an example such as (4: I) Hardly anyone left the country before the- war.
4• I ELLIPSIS, SUBSTITUTION AND 1tBl'B1tBNCE I43 In order to interpret this., we should probably want to know whether country meant 'rural areas • (hence 'hardly anyone moved. into the towns') or • national unie; if the latter, which country was being referred to, and whether left meant 'emigrated' or 'went abroad on holiday~; which war; whether hardly anyone referred to the whole population. or a given social or family group; and. so on. All this is rdev:mt information if we want to understand this sentence. But there is nothing in the structure of the sen- tence to suggest that it has been left out. There are two occurrences of the reference item the. both of them probably generalized exophoric; but there is nothing to make us feel that we must have missed some vital pre- vious clawe or sentence. The structure is not such as to presuppose any preceding text. When we talk of ellipsis, we are not referring to any and every instance in which there is some infOrmation that the speaker has to supply from his own evidence. That would apply to practically every sentence that is ever spoken or written, and wou1d be of no help in explaining the nature of a text. We are referring specifically to sentences, da~ etc whose struc- ture is such as to presuppose some preceding item, which then serves as the source of the missing infOrmation. An elliptical item is one which, as it were, leaves specific structural slots to be filled from elsewhere. This is exactly the same as presupposition by substitution. except that in substi- tution an explicit • counter • is used. eg: one or de, as a place-marker for what is presupposed. whereas in ellipsis nothing is inserted into the slot. That is why we say that ellipsis can be regarded as substitution by zero. For example, [4-:2.1 Joan brought some carnations. :and Catherine some sweet peas. The structure of the second clause is Subject and Complement. This struc- ture normally appears ouly in clauses in which at least one element, the Prediaror. is presupposed.. to be suppliedfiom the preceding clause. Note that there is no possible alternative interpretation here; the second clause can he interpreted only as Catherine brought some sweet peas. There the two clauses are structurally related; the second is BRANCHED. Now consider [4:3] Would you like to hear another verse? I know twelve more. Here there is no structural relationship between the two parts. The second sentence contains a nominal group twelve mere, consisting of a Numerative ou1y, for which we have to supply a Head noun verses presupposed from the first sentence. Again, a nominal group having a Numerative but no
I# ELLIPSIS Head will normally be found. only in contexts of presupposition. To give a slightly more complex example: [4-:4-] • And how many hours a day did you 00 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 nominal group nine is presupposing. meaning nine hours~ and so is the next. meaning the next day. The two clauses niM the nnt and ten hour~ the first d~ty are also both presupposing, representing we did lessons tm lwurs the first ddy, etc. In all these examples the clauses and the nominal groups dis- play structures that clearly show them to be presupposing. Where there is. dlipsis, there is a presupposition, in the structur~ that something is to be supplied. or 'understood •. This is not quite the same thing as saying that we cm tell from the stmctu:re of an item whether it is elliptical or not. For practical purposes we often can; but it is not in fact the structure which makes it elliptical. An item is elliptical if its structure does not express all the features that have gone into its make-up - all the meaningful choi.ces that are embodied in it. In other words. we can take as a general guide the notion that ellipsis occurs when something that :is structurally necessary is left wuaid; there is a sense of incompleteness associated with it. But it is weful to recognize that this is an over-simplification, and that the essential characteristic of dlipsis is that something which is present in the selection of underlying f systemic') options is. omitted in the structure- whether or not the result- ing structure is in itself"incomplete'. Like substi.turio~ ellipsis is a relation within the text. and in the great majority of instances the presupposed item is present in the preceding text. That is to say, ellipsis is normally :m anaphoric relation. Occasionally the presupposition in an elliptical structure may he exophoric - we noted in