ELLIPSIS IN COMPARATIVES IN ENGLISH

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of certain properties of ellipsis within comparative clauses in English. The analysis has shown that the comparative clauses contain gradable expressions and establish a connection between two-stage concepts related to gradable properties. In other words, what is claimed in the matrix clause is compared to claims from subordinated clauses, so that the corresponding linguistic structures are usually omitted in a comparative clause. An elliptical comparative clause usually consists only of an expanded complement introduced with than, like, as ... as. The omitted parts, most often phrases, parts of predicates (or the whole predication) and clauses, are present in the text as antecedents. We have not limited our research only to the syntactic and / or semantic level in the reconstruction of ellipted content, but to all contexts and situations from which recoverability is possible, regardless of the type of ellipsis. We have examined the conditions and constraints of ellipsis within comparative clauses in the theoretical part, and the properties of the comparative ellipsis in the analysis on the corpus of contemporary English.

Keywords

• ellipsis
• comparatives
• deletion
• gapping
• stranding
• generative grammar