Why be silent? Some functions of ellipsis in natural language

Although ellipsis is a highly pervasive phenomenon in natural language, its function has largely remained a mystery. While the use of ellipsis can make a sentence more difficult to understand, sometimes the reverse is true. Using ellipsis sometimes is the best way, or even the only way, to express a given meaning. Ellipsis can restrict possible readings, express otherwise ineffable meanings, clarify discourse structure, and establish rapport between speaker and hearer. All these functions motivate a closer look at the possibilities of integrating a treatment of ellipsis in natural language applications. 1 Ellipsis Ellipsis is the non-expression of sentence elements whose meaning can be retrieved by the hearer. This is a highly pervasive, but at the same time ill-understood phenomenon in natural language. The presence of ellipsis is commonly believed to be one of the main reasons why natural language is so ambiguous. If sentence elements are left unpronounced, a hearer must rely on other parts of the sentence as well as intonation or extra-sentential information, to recover the unpronounced material. For this reason, an elided utterance could have several meanings. But why would a speaker intentionally choose to make a sentence more ambiguous? And why do speakers make this choice so frequently? For example, Alcántara and Bertomeu (this volume) found that 7.5% of the 6922 events found in their 50,000 word corpus were elided. The standard explanation for ellipsis is in terms of speaker’s economy (or ‘least effort’). By not expressing sentence elements whose presence is not essential for the meaning of the sentence, the speaker can communicate more with fewer words. However, in this paper we will argue that ellipsis has more functions than merely meeting the speaker’s wish to reduce his or her efforts. In the following sections, we discuss a number of other functions, that suggest that the elided form contributes different meanings than their full form counterparts. Ellipsis can restrict possible interpretations, allow us to say things with that are otherwise ineffable, disambiguate * Petra Hendriks gratefully acknowledges the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, NWO (grant no. 015.001.103).