Coordination Ellipsis and Gapping: A Cognitive Construction Approach

Ellipsis constructions are formal patterns in which certain syntactic structure that is expressed to convey the intended content is omitted. The aim of this paper is to provide the basis for a cognitive construction grammar description of coordination ellipsis and gapping in Persian language. Therefore, the present research is based on the descriptive-analytical method, and since ellipsis is widely used in both written and spoken Persian, our corpus will include both types and it adopts cognitive and construction-based approach. The results show that Persian data can be analyzed, using the concept of access and activation introduced by Langacker (2012). Non-constituent coordination is analyzed in the context of other sorts of clausal reduction, including the accentual reduction of unfocused elements as well as ellipsis, where overlapping content is left unexpressed. A pivotal desctiptive notion is the differential i.e. the content appearing in one clausal window that does not appear in the prior window. The results, also, show that the placement of the differential, when it intrrupts the baseline clause, is important. So, It can easily say that the differential directly follows the anti-differential.