In linguistics, ellipsis (from Ancient Greek ἔλλειψις (élleipsis) 'omission') or an elliptical construction is the omission from a clause of one or more words that are nevertheless understood in the context of the remaining elements.
Varieties of ellipsis have long formed a basis of linguistic theory that addresses basic questions of form–meaning correspondence: in particular, how the usual mechanisms of grasping a meaning from a form may be bypassed or supplanted via elliptical structures.
They include, as mentioned and briefly illustrated below: Among experts, there is no unanimity that all of the abovementioned syntaxes form a natural class in the sense of being derived by one and the same mechanism.
The example sentences below employ the convention whereby the elided material is indicated with subscripts and smaller font size.
Canonical cases have a true "gap" insofar as a remnant appears to the left and to the right of the elided material.
Gapping has been thoroughly studied, and it is therefore reasonably well understood, although the theoretical analyses can vary significantly.
A particularly frequent type of stripping is not-stripping (stripping in the presence of not), e.g.: Not-stripping's status as a form of ellipsis can be debated, since the non-elliptical versions of these sentences are unacceptable, and the key trait of ellipsis is that both the elliptical and non-elliptical versions are acceptable.
An aspect of VP-ellipsis that is unlike gapping and stripping is that it can occur forwards or backwards.
It can operate both forwards and backwards like VP-ellipsis, but unlike gapping, stripping, answer fragments, and pseudogapping, e.g.: The sluicing illustrated with these two sentences has occurred in indirect questions.
The following examples illustrate nominal ellipsis with cardinal and ordinal numbers: The following two sentences illustrate nominal ellipsis with possessive determiners: Comparative deletion occurs in clauses introduced by than in English.
The verbal predicates that can license null complement anaphora form a limited set (e.g., know, approve, refuse, decide).
One challenge to theoretical accounts of ellipsis comes from cases where the elided material does not appear to be a constituent.
[4] Some alternative analyses assume more flexible conceptions of syntactic units such as the catena, thus allowing ellipsis to directly target non-constituents without the need for additional movement rules.