Реферат на тему Elliptical sentences in the English language/Неполные предложения в английском языке

Содержание:

INTRODUCTION 3
1 CONCEPT OF ELLIPTICAL SENTENCES 4
2 TYPES OF ELLIPTICAL SENTENCES IN ENGLISH 6
3 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ELLIPTICAL SENTENCES AND SUBSTITUTION 9
4 FUNCTIONS OF ELLIPSIS IN SPEECH 10
CONCLUSION 11
GLOSSARY 12
LIST OF REFERENCES 15

Введение:

It is a curious fact that, although ellipsis is a common
and obvious feature of English, it has not been studied.
Richard Gunter
Linguistics still lacks a single point of view on elliptical sentences and their classifications, which are often vague and contradictory. Also, many aspects of elliptical sentences remain poorly understood. It should be noted that various concepts are embedded in the concept of elliptical sentences, and the volume of this content is also not the same.
In communication process, people invariably face the need to somehow reduce their remarks, and the reasons for this can be very different: interlocutors can rush to tell an interesting story, make their speech easier to understand each other, or just want to recreate an informal conversation the setting. Ellipsis is often used in written as well as in lively colloquial speech. Therefore, the study of the phenomenon of ellipsis in the English language remains an urgent problem of linguistics.
A modern communicative approach to elliptic sentences reveals their dependence on the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in the formation of their semantic structure. The semantics of elliptic interrogative and response elliptic sentences is made out only in the context-situational conditions of their generation. Therefore, in the process of a question-answer communicative act, the factors under the influence of which the semantic structure of elliptic sentences is formed are the context, situation and presupposition.
The relevance of this work is also due to the spread of various «economical» elliptical sentences in the English language due to the huge flow of information, the accelerating pace of life observed in the modern world.
The aim of this work is to systematize scientific approaches to understanding elliptical sentences and to review all possible types of them in modern English.
The objectives of the study are:
to. consider different approaches to understanding elliptical sentences;
to identify the main types of ellipsis in modern English;
to observe the use of elliptical sentences in speech.
In this essay, an attempt is made to analyze and generalize the theoretical material of the late XXth and early XXIst centuries regarding usage of elliptical sentences in the English language.

Заключение:

It is easier to practically distinguish incomplete sentences than to give a definition that satisfies representatives of various concepts in modern linguistics, since elliptical sentences, like other syntactic phenomena, are multi-aspect.
On the whole, any elliptic sentence can be interpreted as a transform of a non-elliptic sentence formed by transforming an ellipse or “deletion”, the essence of which is to replace the explicit version of a word or words with the zero version of the same word. Any word can be subjected to this ellipse operation, both significant and official. ” (13, p.176)
Although elliptical sentences are very common, their use is stylistically limited. The absence of any member of the sentence is due to the characteristic of colloquial speech, the presence of such non-verbal means of communication as gestures, facial expressions, various objects, etc., which depend on situation or context.
Taking into account the dominant position that the development of the language is determined by two trends — to save and expand, it should be noted that one of the main functions of elliptical sentences is to save language resources, reduce sentences by omitting individual words.
The other main function is to serve as expressive means in style. Elliptic sentences are widely used in oratory, fiction as a stylistic tool that gives the text dynamism, great expressiveness.
As the above mentioned Jose Carillo concluded, “They can make writing and speech more cohesive, compact, and forceful. Actually an advanced form of exposition, they can be mastered by getting to know the various patterns of the ellipsis—the grammatical hole in an elliptical sentence—and then applying them logically, unobstrusively, and gracefully” [“The Manila Times”, 05.06.2016].

Фрагмент текста работы:

1 CONCEPT OF ELLIPTICAL SENTENCES

It should be said that the term «elliptical sentences» itself is unambiguous. There are many definitions of an elliptic sentence or ellipsis.
According to the latest found definition by A. P’ Rayan, “Ellipses is the omission of a word or a group of words which we normally use in sentences to make the sentences grammatically correct. Even if there is an omission, the meaning can be understood from contextual clues” [10]. The researcher considers that the main purpose to use ellipsis is to avoid the unnecessary repetition of words.
Halliday and Hasan in Cohesion in English (1976) see text connectedness realized by ellipsis alongside with other means. In their understanding, ellipsis occurs when: “One of the identical linguistic elements is omitted” [8]. They distinguished among nominal, verbal and clausal ellipsis [see more: https://iuuk.mff.cuni.cz/~andrew/EAP/Cohesion-Conjunction.pdf].
Based on the theory of Halliday and Hasan, Deddy Perdana Bakti from identifies nominal, verbal, and clausal ellipsis in movies [4]. From the analysis, the writer summarizes that the amount of verbal ellipsis is more dominant than nominal and clausal ellipsis while the amoung of nominal ellipsis is less than verbal and clausal ellipsis. The writer identified that the dominanat ellipsis that is verbal ellipsis is occured because The Transporter Refueled is an action movie, which contains urgent situaton. This assumption is enriched because the writer also analyzed the context based on aspects of speech situation.
Some researchers give such definition: “Ellipsis is the process of omitting an unnecessary item, which has been mentioned earlier in a text, and replacing it with nothing. It is similar to substitution because “Ellipsis is simply substitution by zero” [1, p. 112].
Normally, it is considered as an anaphoric relation because the omission takes place within a text. When ellipsis occurs, the item that is omitted from the structure of the text, can still be understood. Alike substitution, ellipsis has three types: nominal, verbal, and clausal. In nominal ellipsis, the noun is omitted. Verbal ellipsis involves the omission of the verb. Clausal ellipsis occurs when the clause is omitted [1, p. 113].
One approach to the study of language has been to describe people whose ability to communicate is impaired. Some researchers have argued that it is possible to identify the component mental processes that contribute to the ability to communicate by describing the ways in which language can break down. [6, p. 3] But that approach was much criticized.
COBUILD Advanced English Dictionary includes such meaning of ellipsis in linguistics: “leaving out words rather than repeating them unnecessarily; for example, saying ‘I want to go but I can’t’ instead of ‘I want to go but I can’t go”.
Further it is mentioned that the word under consideration can be also called eclipsis, that is
“omission of parts of a word or sentence” which is shown with “a sequence of three dots (…) indicating an omission in text” in printing [2].
In her study Etsuro Shima from Japan discusses S. Winkler’s book where the latter deals with the question of how syntax, semantics, phonology and pragmatics work together in deriving elliptical constructions. The researcher points out that “Winkler proposes that Information Structure mediating between syntax and semantics constitutes the driving force in the derivation of ellipsis and yields two types of elliptical sentences: the first type is derived by a series of syntactic movements and the second one by a phonological deletion”. Having critically examined Winkler’s analysis of ellipsis constructions based upon the assumption that a contrastive focus and an information focus are distinguished in the syntactic and semantic component Etsuro Shima assumed that “interpretation of a focused phrase is entirely determined by the discourse context” [5, p. 312].
While discussing the problem with overellipted sentence constructions Jose Carillo in his «English Plain and Simple» column in The Manila Times gives the following definition: “An elliptical sentence is a form of a sentence that knocks off some of its words or phrases for brevity’s sake, taking for granted that the reader or listener—aware of the context—would just logically fill in the gaps with the missing grammatical elements” [https://www.manilatimes.net/ 2016/05/06/].
In Russian linguistics, there are also different approaches to the definition of the concept of an elliptic sentence. By L. L. Neliubin’s definition, “an ellipsis is a stylistic figure consisting in omitting any implied element of a sentence” [18, p. 117].