Oldal 155 [155]
OCR
HUNGARIAN-ENGLISH TEXT-BUILDING CONTRASTS Grammatical ellipsis plays an important role in organising texts. The rules for ellipsis show crosslinguistic variation and must be acquired by learners of English as a foreign language. For instance, there is considerable difference between English and Hungarian in giving short answers, as exemplified by the following Hungarian nursery rhyme and its English translation: Voltal kertben? — Voltam. Have you been to the garden? (Yes,) Ihave. Lättäl farkast? Ldttam. Did you see a wolf? (Yes,) I did. Féltél tőle? Féltem. Were you afraid of it? (Yes,) I was. The learning task is considerable: the learner must learn to operate the various auxiliaries in English short answers, and this takes some time. L1 interference may occur: Hungarians may respond with a curt Yes/No, or may repeat the verb or the whole clause: Has he arrived? — Yes. (?) *Yes, arrived. Yes, he has arrived. (?)°’ In other cases learners try to remain on the safe side by avoiding ellipsis where it would be possible in English: The doctor examined him and [he] advised him to take more exercise. Lenina took two half-gramme tablets and Henry [took] three [half-gramme tablets]. Interference of this type may be classed as covert error: the sentence is grammatically correct, but the redundant elements make it less natural, less native-like. 9.5.3.2 Semantic ellipsis Ellipsis, in Halliday and Hasan’s model, is seen as grammatical ellipsis, i.e. the omission of an obligatory element. However, items necessary for the interpretation of the meaning of a lexical item, a phrase or a sentence may be missing from grammatically well-formed sentences, too. Consider this sentence: I saw a man with a wooden leg crossing the street. Does this mean that I saw a man walking on a prosthetic leg or a man carrying a wooden leg in his arms? The sentence is grammatically complete, generated according to the rules of English grammar. Semantically, however, it is not quite complete: some important meaning components have been left unexpressed, leaving interpretation open to some ambiguity. It is semantically elliptical, i.e. not fully explicit (Heltai 2008). 67 Possible, but in most cases dispreferred answers. * 153 +
