Pragmatic Information Extraction From Subject Ellipsis In Informal English

Subject ellipsis is one of the characteristics of informal English. The investigation of subject ellipsis in corpora thus reveals an abundance of pragmatic and extralinguistic information associated with subject ellipsis that enhances natural language understanding. In essence, the presence of subject ellipsis conveys an ‘informal’ conversation involving 1) an informal ‘Topic’ as well as familiar/close ‘Participants’, 2) specific ‘Connotations’ that are different from the corresponding full sentences: interruptive (ending discourse coherence), polite, intimate, friendly, and less determinate implicatures. This paper also construes linguistic environments that trigger the use of subject ellipsis and resolve subject ellipsis.