Ellipsedannelse

Ellipsedannelse, or ellipsis formation, is a linguistic phenomenon in which one or more words or larger parts of a clause are omitted because their content can be recovered from the surrounding context. The resulting utterance remains interpretable and communicatively clear, even though surface syntax is shortened. Ellipsis appears in many languages and styles and is governed by principles of recoverability and parallelism.

Common types include sentence ellipsis, where an entire clause is omitted but its meaning is understood from the preceding context; verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), where the verb phrase is left out in the second conjunct (for example: “John can swim, and Mary can, too”); sluicing, where most of a question is omitted and only a wh-word remains (for example: “Someone called, but I don’t know who”); and gapping, where the second conjunct lacks a shared verb (for example: “John bought apples, and Mary oranges”). These patterns rely on parallel structure and a recoverable antecedent in the discourse.

Licensing of ellipsis depends on syntactic and discourse conditions. The missing material must be recoverable from the prior context, and the remaining structure should preserve intelligibility. In many languages, ellipsis is more frequent in informal speech and in written dialogue, where repetition would be redundant.

Ellipsedannelse is a topic of study in linguistics, with implications for language acquisition, discourse analysis, and natural language processing. In NLP, resolving ellipsis—determining what is omitted and how it relates to the antecedent—is important for accurate parsing, machine translation, and information extraction.