Elliptical Interrogative Structures (on the English Language Material)

An ellipsis is defined as a structural incompleteness of a syntactic construction. Ellipticity is a typical feature of colloquial speech due to the presence of objective conditions for its implementation - nonverbal means of speech communication, the preliminary knowledge of participants in communication, the context of a specific speech situation. The problem of ellipticity of syntactic constructions was widely covered in the Russian linguistics both on the material of Russian and English languages. The theory of English considers ellip-ticity as a special case of incomplete sentences. The issue of incomplete structures is closely related to the concept of a zero syntactic form. The presence of syntactic zeros allows correlating full structures with incomplete structures. These pairs in opposition are characterized by the displacement of the mark from the presence to the absence in a paradigmatic series (M.Y. Blokh). The method of explication of zero syntactic positions allows classifying different elliptical constructions. The classification of interrogative sentences based on the presence or absence of an interrogative pronoun is the most traditional. This classic principle of typology can be correlated with the specific character of the rheme in pronominal and non-pronominal questions. The elliptical question as a natural component of the system of actual division is to be considered on the account of the peculiarities of its rhematic function. This becomes especially evident when considering elliptical echo questions. Their systematization is impossible without taking into account functional and semantic content. Based on the principle of classification by the presence / absence of the interrogative pronoun and the zero position of certain principal members of a sentence (according to the traditional understanding of the sentence as a two-part predicative structure), the following types of elliptical interrogative sentences can be distinguished: pronominal elliptical (with a zero subject-predicate base, with a zero auxiliary verb, with a zero auxiliary verb and a subject) and non-pronominal (with a zero auxiliary verb or a zero subject-predicate base). The elliptical echo questions can be referred to one of the two given types at the account of their rhematic prospective and the character of the response. Some constructions, due to specific structural features or predominance of emotional content, lie on the periphery of the paradigmatic system.

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