omittor

Omittor is a term used in linguistics and computational linguistics to refer to the mechanism that licenses omission of material in language. It is a theoretical construct employed to explain how sentences or discourse can be shortened without losing essential meaning or grammaticality, particularly in ellipsis and discourse-focused contexts.

Etymology traces the word to Latin omittere, meaning “to send away,” with omittor used in some theoretical writings to denote “one who omits.” In linguistic analyses, the term is often employed to describe an abstract operator or process rather than a concrete linguistic object.

In linguistic usage, omittor-like processes account for ellipsis, where repeated material is deliberately dropped in subsequent clauses, and for information-structural patterns that favor economy. Examples include clauses such as “She can play the piano, and he can too,” where the verb phrase is omitted in the second clause but recoverable from context. Pro-drop languages, where subject pronouns may be omitted when the verb carries person information, are another domain where omittor concepts appear in analyses of omission.

In computational linguistics and natural language generation, an omittor module or component may refer to a system’s function for selecting optional content to delete or condense when producing summaries or compact representations. The term remains nonstandard and its usage varies across subfields, with some researchers describing omission phenomena without adopting the label.

See also: ellipsis, deletion, pro-drop, information structure, discourse.