Omissives

Omissives is a term used in some linguistic discussions to refer to devices that signal the omission of a sentence element within discourse. The focus is on elements that are understood from context but not explicitly stated, such as omitted objects, subjects, propositions, or whole clauses. Omissives may be analyzed as markers that highlight this omission rather than as elements that supply missing content themselves.

In practice, omissives can take multiple forms. They may be morphological markers or clitics attached to verbs or other words, indicating that a corresponding argument or proposition has been omitted. They can also appear as discourse-level cues that guide the listener to supply the missing material. As a result, omissives are often discussed in relation to broader ellipsis phenomena or to languages that allow pro-drop or zero-anaphoric structures, depending on the theoretical framework.

Typology within omissives is varied and largely theoretical. Some analyses posit absolute omissives, where a substantial clause component is omitted, while others describe partial omissives that mark only particular elements. Examples are typically hypothetical or drawn from comparative work, illustrating how markers or discourse cues signal omission without stating the missing content explicitly. In many treatments, omissives are viewed as a specialized lens on ellipsis, rather than as a completely separate category, and they are sometimes treated as a subset of pro-drop or zero-anaphora phenomena.

See also: ellipsis, pro-drop languages, zero anaphora, discourse markers, syntactic ellipsis. The term is not universally adopted, and some researchers prefer to analyze omissive phenomena within existing categories of omission and ellipsis rather than as a distinct class.