Ellipsis and Reduced Utterances in Conversation: A Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

Language is a resource and like any other resource, we generally do away with repetition and use it economically. One device that we frequently use to avoid redundancy and to speak and write naturally is the ellipsis. In the present paper, I have chosen a conversational text to demonstrate and illustrate how ellipsis helps us to achieve these objectives. It is an audio-visual conversation, but for the sake of convenience, I have used only the scripted version of the conversation. However, I have referred to aspects of spoken English that characterize conversations in general and this conversation in particular. While analyzing the table tennis conversation, I have used examples from literature to illustrate some features of spoken language and to support my analysis of the conversation.