A Contrastive Study of Persian and English Written Discourse: Ellipsis in Realistic Novels

This study aspires to examine the concept of ellipsis by comparing and contrasting English and Persian written texts. For this purpose, three Persian novels and three English ones were selected. These novels were analyzed carefully; they were compared and contrasted for types and amount of ellipsis used, through a Chi-square analysis.  The results of the data analysis revealed that various types of ellipsis were used differently in these two languages. In other words, in the English corpus, nominal ellipsis was used more frequently than verbal ellipsis but in the Persian one, the use of verbal ellipsis was more frequent than nominal. Moreover, the results of this study lend some support to the idea of the universality of ellipsis, in that, all subtypes of ellipsis were used in these two languages although they  were used more frequently in English than in Persian. This study might have implications for teachers, material developers, and researchers in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. In other words, teaching ellipsis directly to foreign language learners will improve the quality of their writing. Moreover,  the results of the present study have obvious importance in increasing students' awareness of the way native speakers of English organize their writing.