Ellipsis and Cognitive Semantics

Abstract

Ellipsis and cognitive linguistics are closely related to each other, which have been accepted by many linguists. Ellipsis has been described as the omission of some words which have been repeated for many times in the same context. In a broad sense, ellipsis is prevalent in human language. Theories of ellipsis have evolved not only across disciplinary boundaries but also through time. This paper is mainly about the universality of ellipsis among different sentence constructions and the detailed process of ellipsis cognition. From a historical point of view, the popularity of ellipsis comes from the so-called historical turn to simplicity. This paper discusses different constructions of ellipsis by analyzing prominence theory. Although typical examples of ellipsis have been analyzed by the processes of prominence theory, the purpose of this paper is to analyze each individual ellipsis case from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.