Talk:Ellipsis (linguistics)

message: This article, in my opinion, reads pretty poorly. It is written like an essay or piece of homework, not like an encyclopaedia entry, and is more concerned with using as much jargon as is possible than with offering an explanation to the reader. All the sections about "more research needed" have no place in the article. Needs a re-write, I reckon. 109.158.249.60 (talk) 22:48, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: What do you not understand? What is unclear? What is poorly written? The "jargon" is all well established terminology. People who have studied ellipsis are familiar with the terminilogy employed, e.g. gapping, stripping, pseudogapping, sluicing, etc. If the article were to avoid those terms, it would have difficulty saying anything concrete about ellipsis. It would not be able to distinguish between the various types of ellipsis. --Tjo3ya (talk) 00:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: The style of writing

message: Ellipsis occurs in multiple languages, yet this article completely skips any language that is not English. Yes, this is the English language Wikipedia but the topic is part of linguistics which comprises all languages.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by PabloStraub (talk • contribs) 14:59, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Is this about linguistics or just English language?

message: I decided to raise these on the talk page rather than in a big stack of cleanup/dispute tags, though the basic  is necessary.
* The vast majority of this article is unsourced. Most of it reads as correct to me (I have a minor in linguistics, and am not a professional in that field), but it still has to be verifiable.
* A lot of it smells of minor original research transgression, particular synthesis of multiple (unnamed) sources – a personal summarization of "what I know".  We do in fact have to summarize sources and arrange the facts from them into a cohesive encyclopedic piece, and this involves a certain kind of "synthesis" that isn't forbidden, but some of this material appears to be crossing the WP:AEIS line.  Whether it is, and which bits of it might be, will become clearer and be reparable as the sourcing improves.
* Has no information at all on other languages, which is a WP:Systemic bias problem, especially given that this is a general linguistic topic, not an English grammar one.  Each of the example lists would benefit from at least one illustration of the principle at work in another language, and preferably not just the same one over and over again, but with some language-family diversity. (Though we also do not want 15 examples of each in random languages.)  It's an important encyclopedic fact that these processes do not actually look exactly the same in every language, and any given type of ellipsis may or may not be employed by a particular language at all.  There may even be some ellipsis types that are missing from the article because they're not used in English, though that's above my pay grade.
* The whole article has a WP:NOT#TEXTBOOK problem of pedagogical tone (also still found in a lot of our more obscure mathematics articles).  I've done a couple of edits to remove the worst brow-beating (e.g., treatment of our readers like they're brain-damaged and can't understand that material in a section pertains to the topic of the section), and to encyclopedia-ize some almost advocacy-style commentary on what research has to be done and why (which can't be stated in WP's own voice).  But some tone problems remain.  Any time it reads like a lecture, this is a mistake.  See also previous comments about  style and overuse of unexplained jargon.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:33, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  A bunch of problems 

message: is the following ellipsis grammatically correct?
 in actual usage both words occur and have for at least 300 years
 https://www.wordreference.com/definition/different
--Backinstadiums (talk) 10:30, 24 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  in actual usage both words occur and have for at least 300 years 

message: The elliptical adverb clause is not present in the article, and I don't see where it would go except as another in the already long list of *assorted ellipses*. I guess I would propose adding more structure (for example, the verb phrase ellipses already seem like a cohesive grouping). An example of this kind of sentence: 
* I will give you a period of time lasting from now until 10 February to complete this task.
But since I am not an expert in the field, I am reticent to impose a homemade structure onto something there's scholarship around.Speedfranklin (talk) 21:57, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing section(s)? 

message: All of my concerns, in one fell swoop:
'A more recent approach [to what?] states [QUESTION: Can approaches "state" anything?] that the challenges posed by ellipsis [what presumptive challenges?] to phrase structure theories of syntax [why this interpolation of phrase structure?] are due to the phrase structure component of the grammar. [Says who?] In other words, [< an implicit admission that the preceding sentence is quite convoluted] the difficulties facing phrase structure theories stem from the theoretical prerequisite that syntactic structure be analyzed in terms of the constituents that are associated with constituency grammars (= phrase structure grammars). [How is this relevant to ellipsis?] If the theory departs from phrase structures and acknowledges the dependency structures of dependency grammars[5] instead, the ability to acknowledge a different sort of syntactic unit as fundamental opens the door to a much more parsimonious theory of ellipsis.[citation needed; tangential observation] This [this what??] unit is the catena.[6] The assumption is now that ellipsis mechanisms are eliding catenae, whereby many of these catenae fail to qualify as constituents. [So what? Ellipsis mechanisms can elide virtually anything; catena is not somehow special.] In this manner, [what manner?] the need to posit movement to "rectify" much of the ellipsis data disappears.' [citation needed; relevance unclear; significance is argumentative, not elucidative of anything.] --Kent Dominic·(talk) 03:15, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Catena misfit