A Study On Information Function Of Elliptical Sentences

As a typical phenomenon in language, ellipsis has always been a concern for linguistics. With the development of study of language and information, the contribution made by information towards language is becoming more and more significant. However, elliptical sentences, which carry much burden of information transmission, lack of sufficient recognition.This paper presents a literature review of relevant researches done in descriptive grammar school and functional grammar school, including contribution made by domestic scholars as well. Meanwhile, elliptical researches are closely associated with study of language information structure and information function. Much based on Halliday's view about language information, a quantitative method is applied to discover information function of elliptical sentences. By selecting odd articles, 48 articles in all 12 issues of Scientific American magazine in 2005 are under analysis. It turns out that four information functions, conciseness, prominence, contrast and cohesion are found to be achieved in a gradual progress initiating with conciseness, then prominence, then contrast and at last cohesion. What's more, in most cases of single elliptical phenomenon four information functions are realized in three combinations, namely, conciseness plus cohesion, conciseness, prominence plus cohesion and conciseness, prominence, contrast plus cohesion. Besides, combinations of different frequency correspond to different degree, such as combination of conciseness, prominence, contrast plus cohesion ranks the highest in degree while it is at the last place in frequency. It can be deducted that readers-oriented information transmission influences the choice of language form which is considered to be the information carrier.This paper aims to analyze and discuss the information function of ellipsis, which benefits both the information sender or writer and the information receiver or reader. Also with the illustration of ellipsis, the idea of information function is recommended to be paid much more attention in language study.