Setningaskipun

Setningaskipun is a term used in linguistic and literary analysis to describe the deliberate omission of one or more sentences from a discourse to alter narrative focus, rhythm, or interpretive openness. The term appears to be a neologism formed from setning, the word for sentence in several Scandinavian languages, with a coinage that signals skipping. It is not widely established in standard dictionaries and is mostly found in niche scholarly writing and experimental commentary.

Use cases include literary experimentation, abridged translations, and certain forms of transcription or digital rhetoric where brevity is valued. In computational linguistics and natural language processing, the idea underpins sentence-level omission used in automatic summarization, filtering, and content reduction.

Practically, setningaskipun involves removing sentences while preserving enough surrounding context to maintain some coherence. It can speed up pacing, foreground contrasts, or invite reader inference, but excessive omission risks fragmentation, ambiguity, and a disjointed tone.

For example, from a longer passage: “The sun rose over the quiet town. Children filled the streets. Birds sang in the trees. I walked away.” a setningaskipun version might read: “The sun rose over the quiet town. I walked away.” Such omissions change emphasis and tempo while leaving the basic sequence inferable.

See also: ellipsis, abridgement, sentence fragment, discourse analysis.