The Greek word élleipsis came to Latin as ellipsis , which in our language led to ellipsis . It is a concept that is used in grammar, literary theory and rhetoric.
Ellipsis is the elimination of a discursive element whose content can be reconstructed thanks to context information . This means that the receiver is able to infer the suppressed segment .
For example: «The dogs barked incessantly. "They were nervous about something." As you can see, there is an ellipsis in the second sentence, since it is not mentioned who was nervous (the subject is eliminated). This mention is unnecessary because, from the preceding sentence, it is clear that the mention refers to dogs.
The ellipsis can also consist of the deletion of the verb : "Laura played in the bedroom and Pedro, in the dining room." In this case, the ellipsis means the elimination of the verb play, without affecting the meaning of the expression (it is evident that the two people were playing).
In this case it is important to refer to another fundamental topic of our language, from a grammatical point of view: the use of the comma . First of all, this punctuation mark helps us divide the speech into portions that are easier to inton, allowing us to breathe between them and giving the interlocutor more time to understand its meaning. However, with the ellipsis of verbs, the comma becomes necessary to replace them.
Returning to the previous example of the two people who were playing in different parts of the house, if we omitted the comma we would obtain an apparently incomplete sentence: if the last part were "and Pedro in the dining room" , it would give the impression that the verb was missing. , which should be located after the word "dining room", so it would not be easy to understand. Simply place a comma after "Peter" to indicate that this subject is performing the same action as the previous one.
And this leads us to reflect on the risks posed by the increasingly rudimentary use of language, a phenomenon that is difficult to confront in our society. The educational system does not encourage children to worry about grammar, spelling and semantics, but rather continues to impose this knowledge as it has always done: by force and based on memorization. Since programs now write for us, we no longer need to put into practice what we learned in school, and this is made worse by the conventions of instant messaging.
Ellipsis is the conscious omission of an element of discourse, the absence of which does not affect understanding precisely because it is compensated for by the use of other resources that make up the context. If we are unaware of this theory and use ellipsis, intentionally or accidentally, the meaning of our message is affected. It is important to remember that technology is not "to blame" for this decline, but that we must learn to use it properly; in fact, it offers us invaluable correction tools.
As a figure of speech , ellipsis is an omission that is applied to generate a certain effect . Ellipsis is often used to avoid repetitions that, if present, would make the text lose fluidity and rhythm.
In the world of cinema , time ellipses are common to shorten the duration of a film, eliminating fragments that would be irrelevant to the story. They also serve to make narration possible when trying to tell events that are distant from each other. Sometimes, the ellipsis is made explicit through a notice (such as "Four years later" or "Two months later" ).