There are many correct responses upthread, but I wanted to zero in on this claim.
In the construction “It is ____” or “Bob was ____” or “We were ____”, the thing in the blank can be either a noun that is equivalent to the subject of the sentence (it, Bob, we) or an adjective that describes the subject of the sentence. In your case, you could say “It is a company,” with the blank being filled with a noun that is equivalent to the thing “it” refers to, namely the company. You could further decorate that noun with adjectives: “It is a private company.” Completely separately from this usage, you could instead put an adjective in the blank: “It is private.”
If that isn’t sitting well, consider the case where the subject isn’t a pronoun. “The sky is orange.” I don’t have to say “The sky is an orange sky.” If the sky was established as an object of interest already, though, I might use a pronoun as the subject: “Look at the beautiful sky. It is orange.”
When an adjective is used this way, it is called a “predicate adjective”. But, the existence of a name shouldn’t imply that this is somehow unusual. It’s an everyday (nay, every conversation) usage. Indeed, the noun in the other version has a name too: “predicate nominative”. Grammarians like names.
It is not ellipsis. That would be something like: “I usually use ketchup. My brother, mustard.”
(I’m ignoring the comma slice issue. It’s tangential to the meat of the question.)
I suspect the OP just chose a poor example, as “it is private” makes sense by itself. Perhaps they were thinking of something like
“This company is not in fact larger than General Electric. It is smaller.”
Now, the second sentence all by itself has strictly valid syntax (Noun + identity verb + adjective) but all by itself it is also meaningless, because ‘smaller’ all by itself is meaningless (smaller than what?). It is understood to mean “It is smaller (than General Electric)”.
Or another example “I don’t like apples. Bob does.” Again, “Bob does” has a noun and a verb; perfectly valid syntax, but it only means something if the implied “like apples” is added.
I think maybe this is what the OP was trying to get at. I don’t know a particular name for this phenomenon, but maybe this helps pin it down.
But I don’t want to say I think this is poor English; in general it’s pretty well understood by most people. Obviously it can be confusing, and depending on the purpose and context it could be better to be explicity, but that’s a judgement call for that particular situation.
I agree the OP had a technically incorrect comma splice, but a pretty harmless one. It’s easier to demonstrate the phenomemon with two separate sentences anyway.
It’s not ellipsis, because the sentence is grammatically correct (and also semantically correct) without adding anything. Where would you put the ellipsis:
It is [a] private [company] ?
Whenever we say “It is red” are we using ellipsis to really mean “It is [a] red [thing]” ?
I agree that a semicolon is required to fit grammar-school rules, but I suspect this is a common enough example where (for hundreds of years) people have been using commas rather than semicolons, probably because the second independent clause is so short the extra clarity of a semicolon is not only unnecessary, it’s a bit abrupt.
That’s a guess. I can’t cite, and I’d be happy to be contradicted by someone who can back up an argument against this, but not simply by citing the dogma that “two independent clauses are separated by a semicolon, not a comma.”
In any case, I’d simplify the sentence to “This is not a public company.” Adding “, it’s private” doesn’t clarify or illuminate. Admittedly it adds emphasis, but unnecessary emphasis is probably one of the most common style errors.
I think the OP is almost a N-ellipsis, as the second phrase omits the noun (‘company’) that was in the first phrase. However, since the remaining element is an adjective paired with an identity verb, we end up with a syntactically correct phrase, so I assume this isn’t actually ellipsis.
My first example (“This company is not in fact larger than General Electric. It is smaller.” ) is clearly comparative deletion, while the second (“I don’t like apples. Bob does.”) is a verb-phrase ellipsis (though just from wiki, it’s a little unclear whether VP is considered a subset of gapping ellipsis).
Would you say that there is a nominal ellipsis in the sentence “The ball is red.”? If no, what about “Look at that ball. It is red.”? These sentences have predicate adjectives, not elided predicate nominatives.
“Fred did three onerous tasks because Susan had done two.” This sentence is also semantically complete, as two is also a pronoun. Yet it is listed as an ellipsis.
“Private company” in this context a single concept and can’t be separated, as it means something different than “This company is private.” Hence the word “company” is elided. Otherwise the second clause doesn’t follow from the first. The full second sentence is not “This is private,” which would mean nothing, but “This is [a] private [company].”
Anyways, blueslipper: the answer is ellipsis. There’s just not another word that remotely fits. Don’t worry about the nitpicking. It’s what we do here.
Most statements that you might wish to make can be made in a number of equally grammatically correct ways. The choice between different grammatically correct ways of making a statement is not a grammatical choice; it’s a matter of style. Merely because the sentence you utter is shorter than the sentence you might have uttered to express the same idea doesn’t mean that the sentence you did utter is an example of ellipsis.
“Your eyes are blue” is not an ellipsis of “your eyes are blue eyes”.
“John is dead” is not an ellipsis of “John is a dead man”.
“ABC Inc is private” is not an ellipsis of “ABC Inc. is a private company”.
A) None of those is analogous to the sentence posed by the OP.
B) What does any of that have to do with your statement that “Ellipsis involves leaving out words which are grammatically necessary but which are taken to be understood.”? And who says that is correct is the first place?
The third of them is very closely analagous to the phrase in the OP which, it is suggested by some, is an an example of ellpsis - “It is private”, said to be an ellipsis of “it is a private company”. The only difference is that I have used a proper noun in place of a pronoun, and I can’t see how that destoys the analogy.
B) What does any of that have to do with your statement that “Ellipsis involves leaving out words which are grammatically necessary but which are taken to be understood.”? And who says that is correct is the first place?
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Well, I went on my own understanding that ellipsis involves more than just omitted words that could have been included; it involves omitting necessary words.
The OED backs me up, sort of. It defines ellipsis as “the omission of one or more words in a sentence, which would be needed to complete the grammatical construction or fully to express the sense”. I grant you that’s slightly wider than my original formulation, but it backs up my view that the OP examples do not involve ellipsis. We are told in the OP example that “it” is private, and in the context of the sentence in the OP we don’t need any additional words to tell is what “it” is. “It” is the company already explicitly referred to.
“This is a private, not a public com,pany.” Nope.
“This is, a private, not a public company.” Uh-uh.
“This, private, is not a public company. You’re in the army now.” OK, got it.
