ellipsis (n.)

A term used in GRAMMATICAL analysis to refer to a SENTENCE where, for reasons of economy, emphasis or style, a part of the STRUCTURE has been omitted, which is recoverable from a scrutiny of the CONTEXT. TRADITIONAL grammars talk here of an ELEMENT being ‘understood’, but LINGUISTIC analyses tend to constrain the notion more, emphasizing the need for the elided (or ellipted) parts of the sentence to be unambiguously specifiable. For example, in the sequence A: Where are you going? B: To town, the ‘full’ FORM of B’s sentence is predictable from A’s sentence (‘I am going to town’). But in such sentences as Thanks, Yes, etc., it is generally unclear what the full form of such sentences might be (e.g. ‘Thanks are due to you’? ‘I give you thanks’?), and in such circumstances the term ‘ellipsis’ would probably not be used. Elliptical constructions are an essential feature of everyday conversation, but the rules governing their occurrence have received relatively little study. They are also sometimes referred to as REDUCED, CONTRACTED, DELETED, or ‘abbreviated’ constructions.