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Nominal ellipsis occurs with a limited set of determinatives in English (cardinal and ordinal numbers and possessive determiners), though it is much freer in other languages. The following examples illustrate nominal ellipsis with cardinal and ordinal numbers: Fred did three onerous tasks because Susan had done two onerous tasks.
Standard instances of answer ellipsis occur in answers to questions. A question is posed, and the answer is formulated in such a manner to be maximally efficient. Just the constituent that is focused by the question word is uttered. The elided material in the examples in this article is indicated using a smaller font and subscripts:
Ellipsis is the narrative device of omitting a portion of the sequence of events, allowing the reader to fill in the narrative gaps. Aside from its literary use, the ellipsis has a counterpart in film production. It is there to suggest an action by simply showing what happens before and after what is observed.
In rhetoric, zeugma (/ ˈ zj uː ɡ m ə / ⓘ; from the Ancient Greek ζεῦγμα, zeûgma, lit. "a yoking together" [1]) and syllepsis (/ s ɪ ˈ l ɛ p s ɪ s /; from the Ancient Greek σύλληψις, súllēpsis, lit. "a taking together" [2]) are figures of speech in which a single phrase or word joins different parts of a sentence.
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 ellipsis (/ ə ˈ l ɪ p s ɪ s /, plural ellipses; from Ancient Greek: ἔλλειψις, élleipsis, lit. ' leave out ' [1]), rendered ..., alternatively described as suspension points [2]: 19 /dots, points [2]: 19 /periods of ellipsis, or ellipsis points, [2]: 19 or colloquially, dot-dot-dot, [3] [4] is a punctuation mark consisting of a series of three dots.
These examples of not-gapping suggest two things: that not-stripping, and thus stripping in general, is indeed a particular manifestation of the gapping mechanism and that not-stripping is also indeed ellipsis, since the ellipsis analysis of not-gapping is the only plausible analysis.
A rhetorical question may be intended as a challenge. The question is often difficult or impossible to answer. In the example, "What have the Romans ever done for us?" (Monty Python's Life of Brian) the question functions as a negative assertion. It is intended to mean "The Romans have never done anything for us!"