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Answer ellipsis (= answer fragments) is a type of ellipsis that occurs in answers to questions. Answer ellipsis appears very frequently in any dialogue, and it is present in probably all languages. Of the types of ellipsis mechanisms, answer fragments behave most like sluicing, a point that shall be illustrated below.
Answer ellipsis involves question-answer pairs. The question focuses on an unknown piece of information, often using an interrogative word (e.g., who, what, when etc.). The corresponding answer provides the missing information and in so doing, the redundant information that appeared in the question is elided, e.g.: Q: Who has been hiding the truth?
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
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.)
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 ...
In the 1580s, English printer Henry Denham invented a "rhetorical question mark" (βΈ®) for use at the end of a rhetorical question; however, it fell out of use in the 17th century. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it.
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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.