This study aspires to examine the concept of ellipsis by comparing and contrasting English and Persian written texts. For this purpose, three Persian novels and three English ones were selected. These novels were analyzed carefully; they were compared and contrasted for types and amount of ellipsis used, through a Chi-square analysis.  The results of the data analysis revealed that various t...

This paper raises a neglected issue in the study of ellipsis resolution. The existence of ellipsis under certain constructions is often disguised due to the structure that assigns the nominative marking to what is typically the object. This kind of ellipsis deserves attention in view of the fact that its referent is the agent of the sentence and that these constructions are observed in diverse ...

Despite the body of research on textbook evaluation from the discourse analysis perspective, cohesive devices have rarely been analyzed in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) textbooks. The acquisition and use of cohesive devices is inherent to naturalistic communication, including business interactions. Hence, L2 learners of business English should be exposed to these devices through cohesion-...

The purpose of this paper is to solve the contextual ellipsis problem that is popular in our Chinese spoken dialogue system named EasyNav. A Theme Structure is proposed to describe the attentional state. Its dynamic generation feature makes it suitable to model the topic transition in user-initiative dialogues. By studying the differences and the similarities between the ellipsis and the anapho...

Ellipsis Interpreting a verb-phrase ellipsis (VP ellipsis) requires accessing an antecedent in memory, and then integrating a representation of this antecedent into the local context. This problem was investigated in 4 speed-accuracy trade-off and 2 eye-tracking experiments. To investigate whether the antecedent for a VP ellipsis is accessed with a search or direct-access retrieval process, Exp...

The research reported here is part of a larger project investigating similarities and differences among varieties of ellipsis constructions, including VP ellipsis, Sluicing, Pseudogapping, Gapping and NP ellipsis. Merchant (2008), and more recently Tanaka (2011), have claimed that while VP ellipsis (VPE) can tolerate a mismatch in voice between antecedent and ellipsis site, Pseudogapping and Sl...

this paper presents an investigation of the structure of persian clauses which display verb phrase ellipsis. to this end, verb phrase ellipsis in persian will be discussed in the light of the two theoretically significant approaches to ellipsis, namely, structural versus non-structural. drawing on data from persian and running the independently devised syntactic tests, we will argue that the or...

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 famili...

This paper argues that elliptical VPs do not necessarily present cases of VP ellipsis. Certain relative clauses that contain elliptical VPs are analysed as instances of transitive verb phrase ellipsis. A storing account of ellipsis resolution is given. Resolution of TVP ellipsis is achieved by resolving a binary relation that derives from an antecedent TVP. This avoids the problem of antecedent...

Much work on ellipsis has been conducted using data from English, and many widely acknowledged types of ellipsis exist in English. The extent to which the named ellipsis mechanisms exist in other languages is, though, often not clear. This manuscript surveys ellipsis in Mandarin Chinese using a dependency-based approach to syntax. It probes to see which ellipsis mechanisms exist in Mandarin. Th...