Elliptical history

2. The second person pronoun, you (which will be put in the form of questions for the following examples).

In the final part of my work I would like to try to view the term of ellipsis from some other angle. The point is that what we are saying in our everyday life is crutially incomplete.The sentences we use can be incomplete, can fail to make explicit everything that is being said, in various ways. One obvious type of incompleteness is found in proper names. You can overhear someone talking of Mary or Graham and while you can understand what she is saying you probably won't know exactly which Mary or Graham she is talking about. It is true that a few names become common currency - if I wrote about Ronald Reagan you would probably know which man I was referring to, though there are almost certainly many men with that name - but in general, names don't come so closely linked to a particular person, place or thing. Again, words like the personal pronouns or other words, like "this", "yesterday", "here", etc.: pointing words, do not explicitly tell you to what they are referring; that has to be supplied from knowing the context in which the sentence has been used.

Ellipsis in advertisments.

Here some of Fowler's examples (1926) may perhaps be left for discussion. Some sound very antiquated; others lie in the no man's land between acceptability and rejection: e.g. The ringleader was hanged and his followers imprisoned (ellipsis of were); Mr Balfour blurted out that his own view was the House of Lords was not strong enough (ellipsis of that); I assert the feeling in Canada today is such against annexation that etc. (ellipsis of that); The evil consequences of excess of these beverages is much greater than alcohol (ellipsis of with). Only the first of these seems to allow the reader to proceed with minimal (or even no) discomfort. For the remainder, and for several other examples cited by Fowler, removal of the difficulty is best achieved by reconstruction, not merely by supplying the element that is intended to be 'understood'.

Now let"tms find out what exactly can be omitted in incomplete (elliptical) sentences.

Instead of applying one word for another, many authors took this rule to justify their applying no word(s) for others. Eventually, this rule formulated the defining of an ellipsis and elliptical sentence in which grammarians began creating types of elliptical constructions. William Bright describes that men such as Sag and William's, during the 1970's began to research elliptical construction and words that were applied rather than stated in Middle and Modern English. From there they began prescribing certain types and usage's for an ellipsis. For example:

5.Sentences without a word-form in the predicate position. Such ellipses occur only in replies to questions.