英語의 省略現象

Ellipsis Phenomena in English

Ellipsis is a grammatical process whereby the structure of a sentence is abbreviated or omitted to avoid redundancy. We will try to explain the conditions on ellipsis and the use of pro-forms. Ellipted structures are used to increase the sentential clarity and cohesion while pro-forms are preferred to maintain the overt linkage of conjuncts and conjunctions as well as the covert linkage of coreference and substitution. The full form of what has been ellipted is generally recoverable from context according to the principle of deletion under identity without ambiguous interpretations. Three major types of recoverability are: (i) textual recoverability, (ii) structural recoverability, (iii) situational recoverability. The criteria for ellipsis are: (a) The ellipted words are precisely recoverable. (b) The elliptical construction is grammatically ‘defective’. (c) The insertion of the missing words results in a grammatical sentence with the same meaning as the original sentence. (d) The missing words are textually recoverable. (e) The missing words are present in the text in exactly the same form. We usually distinguish between ‘general ellipsis’ and ‘special ellipsis’, ‘initial ellipsis’, ‘final ellipsis’ and ‘medial ellipsis’. We deal with the phenomena of ‘anaphoric ellipsis’ and ‘cataphoric ellipsis’. Finally we examined the NP ellipsis and clausal ellipsis. (Wonkwang University)