Situational Ellipsis And Translation Techniques

Ellipsis is a linguistic phenomenon existing widely in human language. It plays an important role in linguistic communication. It occurs frequently not only in oral English, but also in written English. With the development of the modern society and the emergence of the fast living rhythm, English is becoming more and more concise. To adapt to the fast developing society, people are pursuing briefness and speediness in speaking and writing. Ellipsis has been observed for quite a long time and profound studies have been made on its structure and function from different aspects. Based on former scholars'understanding on ellipsis, this dissertation focuses on a most reasonable definition proposed by Halliday who regards the elliptical item as one which leaves specific structural slots to be filled from elsewhere and classification by Quirk who divides ellipsis into textual ellipsis, structural ellipsis and situational ellipsis.Situational ellipsis occurs mainly in spoken language, while,"Friends", a famous American TV play, bearing simple and authentic lines, is the unfeigned portraiture of life. Its humorous nature deeply attracts our English learners and its practicability will undoubtedly benefit the students in their English learning. Taking it as the database, sixty-six typical examples are collected to illustrate four types of situational ellipsis in English and translation techniques from English to Chinese.This dissertation is an attempt to study elliptical phenomena from the pragmatic perspective, namely, to give situational ellipsis a comprehensive analysis on the ground of the conversational implicature theory. At first, it points out that situational ellipsis is the product of violating the Quantity Maxim, thus conversational implicature comes into being. Since the former scholars rarely mention the translation techniques, in the light of the two viewpoints toward pragmatic translation: Qian Guanlian's"implicature"and He Ziran's"explicature", the dissertation advances on the basis of the case study that translating situational ellipsis can by no means follow one certain viewpoint blindly. The flexible combination of the two views provides a comparatively tactful solution to this problem, mainly including three methods: preservation, amplification and substitution. We hope that it will serve as a good starting-point for the further study in translating conversations in literary works, thus enhance the exchange between English and Chinese.