This article is dedicated to examination of the component structure of simple elliptical sentence. The author reviews the key theoretical positions pertaining to the structure of these units. A hypothesis is advanced on revelation of the formula of simple elliptical sentence, which consists in idea of three-component nature of these structures with different literal manifestation of the constituent elements of a sentence. The concept of “three-component nature” of elliptical construct suggest the presence of three components, some of which continue to “act while absent”: subject, elliptical verb component, and distributor of verb component. Simple elliptical sentences from the novel by M. A. Sholokhov “And Quiet Flows the Don” served as the material for this research. The following conclusions were made: simple elliptical sentence is a construct with all attributes of a full sentence from the perspective of semantics, as well as structure; their peculiarity consists in elimination of the predicate, which is also one of the structural components of the syntactic under review; structural formula of any elliptical sentence consists in the presence of three components, which can be literary manifested or the other way around. This research contributes to elucidation of the phenomenon of simple elliptical sentences as sentences with more semantic saturation than the construction with verbalized predicate, as well as to more profound research on Sholokhov’s syntax.