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A Pragmatic Approach to Ellipsis in Russian and Polish Colloquial and Informal Texts of the Novel “Exit to the South”
Cross-Cultural Studies
2013,
33(), pp.407-459
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2013.33..407
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2013.33..407
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
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The paper pragmatically analyzes ellipsis in Russian and Polish colloquial and informal texts. The famous Polish writer Sławomir Mrożek's "Exit to the South",written in Polish and Russian is used as a material for the analysis. Russian and Polish ellipsis in colloquial and informal texts have in common that the givenness and subjecthood of the elliptical co-referent play a crucial role. However, the ellipsis in two languages also has differences in many ways. Above all, in the Polish texts of colloquial and informal style, a theme is likely to be elliptical and the coreferential relation reaches to an extra-sentential antecedent, while the ellipsis in analysed Russian texts in most cases requires coordinate, subordinate or relative clauses, and the elliptical co-referent tends to have an intra-sentential antecedent. The ellipsis of the theme-subject is unmarked in Polish, where every verbal form has an ending denoting person. Unlike formal style which often allows explicit noun subject, Polish text of colloquial and informal style prefer null form of the subject in most cases. If Polish sentences have explicit theme-subjects,they disambiguate intervening and main themes, and indicate the contrast, the focus, the introduction of new narratives or the change of speaker's point of view. Sometimes direct speeches and deictic pronouns also need explicit theme-subjects in Polish sentences. On the other hand, the ellipsis of the theme-subject is marked in Russian even in colloquial and informal texts. The theme-subject can be deleted in Russian colloquial and informal texts, if the subject is a form of the first or the second person, or if the aspect and the tense of the antecedent sentence's verb are the same as those of the given sentence's verb and both the antecedent and the coreferential word have the nominative case.
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