언어사용의 경제성과 생략

Abstract

Efficient communication is based on the economy of language use. This can be realized by ellipsis - omitting some of the surface expressions which may be recovered from the neighboring sentence or clause unambiguously. Ellipsis occurs on the basis of identity condition and recoverability principle for the pupose of enhancing the efficient communication and increasing the familiarity among participants. This phenomenon is a means of expressing the cohesive relation of the text by omitting old information. Ellipsis does not always occur when linguistic items are identical to each other. The major constituent requirement is needed in the elliptical environment. There are constraints on both the remnants and the omitted part. Ellipsis is rejected if it causes syntactic and semantic conflicts. There are also constraints on the direction of ellipsis in connection with related linguistic items. The elliptical environment is established with the reduction of the information value according to context-dependence. From the point of understanding the text, the constraints which coincide with relevance principle, information unit and the limit of working memory are related to efficient communication. This device enhances the economy of language.