In this study, we explored the ellipsis and explicitness of the constituent elements in the sentence composition in Japanese sentence style from the cognitive point of view. A sentence is composed of the subjective judgment of the subject who generates the sentence structure, and the cognition of the person who is the subject is expressed in the form. Therefore, in this research, we examined the article sentences, advertisement sentences, and diary sentences in order to analyze the cognition of language users in various sentence styles.
The advertisement text shows the highest frequency of the ellipsis phenomenon, and readers’cognitive interpretation of guessing is required. Therefore, it was considered that the advertisement text is intersubjective during the expression in which the writer was aware of the cognitive state of the reader. On the other hand, in diary sentences, it had been expected that many sentence constituents would be elliptic, but it was clarified from actual examples that a considerable number of explicit phenomena were seen. This is due to the fact that the writer tends to explicitly indicate elements that focus on the writer’s "profile" in the diary sentence, and thereby the subjectivity was indexed. Finally, in the case of article sentences, it was revealed that the ellipsis was not seen and the sentence components were explicitly shown in detail. Article sentences are mainly intended to describe facts and deliver them to readers as information. It means that the article sentence presupposes neither the information shared with readers nor the writer’s profile. The sentence constituents for the article sentence are thus the information necessary to describe the facts, and are not the ‘explicit phenomenon’offered by the current study. In other words, the article sentence has a style of grasping situations objectively, and thereby describes the fact as it is without ellipsis or explicit phenomenon in which the indices of subjectivity and intersubjectivity are seen.