Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The following examples illustrate nominal ellipsis with cardinal and ordinal numbers: Fred did three onerous tasks because Susan had done two onerous tasks. The first train and the second train have arrived. The following two sentences illustrate nominal ellipsis with possessive determiners: I heard Mary's dog, and you heard Bill's dog.
As seen in the examples above, VP ellipsis can be used to avoid redundancy in language. For example, "I like Linda's cookies, and Rebecca does too" is a much more concise sentence than "I like Linda's cookies, and Rebecca likes Linda's cookies too." VP ellipsis acts as a mechanism of grammatical reduction and contributes to clarity in language ...
The stylebook indicates that if the shortened sentence before the mark can stand as a sentence, it should do so, with an ellipsis placed after the period or other ending punctuation. When material is omitted at the end of a paragraph and also immediately following it, an ellipsis goes both at the end of that paragraph and at the beginning of ...
The example sentence She gave the first talk on gapping, and he gave the first on stripping is the context, whereby the trees focus just on the structure of the noun phrase showing ellipsis. For each of the three theoretical possibilities, both a constituency-based representation (associated with phrase structure grammars ) and a dependency ...
The following sentences are basic examples of VP-ellipsis and pseudogapping. Each pair draws attention to the similarities and differences across the two closely related ellipsis mechanisms. A smaller font and subscripts are used to mark the elided material, and the antecedent to the ellipsis is bolded:
Canonical examples of gapping have a true "gap", which means the elided material appears medially in the non-initial conjuncts, with a remnant to its left and a remnant to its right. The elided material of gapping in all the examples below is indicated with subscripts and a smaller font: Some ate bread, and others ate rice.
The first example is ungrammatical because the island prevents us from moving anything out of the subject constituent (shown in square brackets). The second example is saved through sluicing as the island is sluiced and the meaning can be inferred from the context of the sentence, therefore maintaining the meaning and remaining grammatical.
(Because ellipsis involves the omission of words, ambiguities can arise. The sentence could also be read as, "Histories make men wise, make poets witty, make mathematics subtle, make natural philosophy deep, makes moral [philosophy] grave, and make logic and rhetoric able to contend.")