ELLIPSIS OF TEXT AND DISCOURSE: A PROBLEM OF COHERENCE AND OF CONTEXT

My article, obviously approaching the ellipsis of text and discourse, aims at emphasizing the implications contexts have when syntactical forms prove insufficient in the comprehension of a text. The focus of this paper has been to demonstrate that, in the conditions of any manifestation of a form of a certain ambiguity or incompleteness in the production of verbal expression, inferential operations become necessary in order to allow a reconstruction of the implicite content. The ambiguity of an expression may be removed by appealing to the situation of communication. We have considered it necessary to show what kind of implications and mechanisms are involved by coherence and globalism as features of a logical sequencing of statements and of integration of local meanings in a global meaning. Enumerating the meanings of the word context as listed by various linguists, we have underlined the fact that the difficulty and complexity of the analysis of complete vs incomplete statements is determined by the diversity of the situations in which these statements are made. We have illustrated this theory with a few examples taken over from Nolke (1993) in which those "sentence adverbs" that lack the context of a sentence play the role of ellipsis, having the function of making a comment on the utterance or on the statement itself. Cherchi's study (1978) gives us a few clues significant for the complexity of the study of ellipsis , namely: a) sentence grammar is not the most effective tool in the analysis of ellipsis; b) ellipsis should be integrated in the linguistics of discourse; c) elliptic discourse always involves reference to one of the elements of a situation which are present in the making of the utterance (object, characteristic, fact); d) the function of the ellipsis is more to isolate rather than to express anything, and within a sequence of elements, the placement of ellipsis represents either openness or a limit within the sequences that make up the group. In conclusion, we may say that ellipsis is proof of the cohesion of statements within such a sequence of statements, and its role is determined by the discourse competence , which consists in the production and the preservation of the coherence of the discourse.