Abstract

This chapter surveys elliptical phenomena and their interrelatedness to central information-structural notions. The term ellipsis most generally refers to the omission of linguistic material, structure, and/or sound. The ellipsis site is crucially connected to the notion of givenness of the unpronounced or deleted string. The remnants of the ellipsis site, which occur to the left or right of the omitted material, are frequently connected to the notion of contrastive topic and focus. The core question of modern linguistic theory is how syntactic and information-structural theories interact in accounting for the licensing of the different types of elliptical phenomena. The discussion shows that information structure and discourse factors influence the form and the interpretation of ellipsis.