BEYOND SYNTACTIC DELETION: A COGNITIVE SEMANTIC ACCOUNT OF ELLIPSIS
Keywords:
ellipsis; cognitive semantics; construction grammar; mental spaces; discourse coherence; verb-phrase ellipsis; sluicingAbstract
Ellipsis — the omission of linguistic material recoverable from context — has
been studied predominantly within generative syntactic frameworks that treat it as a
deletion or non-pronunciation operation applying to fully formed syntactic structures.
This article proposes a complementary, usage-based account grounded in cognitive
semantics and construction grammar. Drawing on naturally occurring data from English
conversational and written discourse, we argue that ellipsis resolution is primarily a
conceptual rather than a formal syntactic process: interlocutors reconstruct omitted
material through frame activation, mental-space mapping, and prototype-based
categorisation rather than by reversing covert syntactic deletions. We report findings
from a corpus-based analysis of 1,200 elliptical utterances spanning verb-phrase ellipsis
(VPE), nominal ellipsis (NE), and sluicing, demonstrating that antecedent-recovery
rates and interpretation accuracy correlate more strongly with conceptual salience
measures than with structural parallelism indices. The implications for theories of
language comprehension, discourse coherence, and the syntax–semantics interface are
discussed.
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