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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.
As with most ellipsis mechanisms, theoretical accounts of stripping face significant challenges. The greatest challenge is to come up with a coherent explanation of the stripped material. The insight that the remnant of stripping is always a constituent is straightforward.
In the examples throughout this article, the ellipsis is indicated using a smaller font and subscripts, the element that introduces the ellipsis is in bold, and the antecedent to the ellipsis is underlined: When Susan brings her dog, Sam brings his dog too. - N-ellipsis introduced by possessive Jill likes your story even though she hates Bill's ...
Theoretical accounts of answer ellipsis are faced with the same basic problem that challenges the accounts of other ellipsis mechanisms. This problem revolves around the fact that the elided material often does not form a constituent in surface syntax. The following trees illustrate the problem.
The VP-ellipsis test checks to see which strings containing one or more predicative elements (usually verbs) can be elided from a sentence. Strings that can be elided are deemed constituents: [14] The symbol ∅ is used in the following examples to mark the position of ellipsis: Beggars could immediately put off the customers when they arrive, and
Sluicing is illustrated with the following examples. In each case, an embedded question is understood though only a question word or phrase is pronounced. (The intended interpretations of the question-denoting elliptical clause are given in parentheses; parts of these are anaphoric to the boldface material in the antecedent.)
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.
As noted above, VP ellipsis is generally impossible if it would operate both backwards and upwards. There are also certain other restrictions on the possibility of ellipsis, although a complete theoretical analysis may be lacking. Two examples of environments in which ellipsis fails are now given: [15] (15) *A proof that God exists does <exist>.