Abstract
Abstract The primary goal of contemporary theoretical linguistics is to develop a theory of the correspondence between sound (or gesture) and meaning. Nowhere does this sound-meaning correspondence break down more spectacularly than in the case of ellipsis. And yet various forms of ellipsis are pervasive in natural language—words and phrases that by rights should be in the linguistic signal go missing. How is this possible? It is possible because ellipsis is parasitic on redundancy: to paraphrase Wittgenstein, ‘wovon man nicht sprechen muß, darüber kann man schweigen’. Elliptical processes capitalize on the redundancy of certain kinds of information in certain contexts, and permit an economy of expression by omitting the linguistic structures that would otherwise be required to express this information.
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