UDS got it in one.
I’m having trouble understanding why this is not ellipsis–from original post:
If I say - ‘This is not a public company, it is private.’
Instead of saying full - ‘This is not a public company, it is a private company.’
From
Nominal ellipsis
Noun ellipsis (also N-ellipsis, N’-ellipsis, NP-ellipsis, NPE, ellipsis in the DP) occurs when the noun and potentially accompanying modifiers are omitted from a noun phrase.[1] Nominal ellipsis occurs with a limited set of determinatives in English (cardinal and ordinal numbers and possessive determiners), whereas it is much freer in other languages. The following examples illustrate nominal ellipsis with cardinal and ordinal numbers:
Fred did three onerous tasks because Susan had done two [onerous tasks].
-nominal ellipsis
The first train and the second [train] have arrived.
-nominal ellipsis
And the following two sentences illustrate nominal ellipsis with possessive determiners:
I heard Mary’s dog, and you heard Bill’s [dog].
-N-ellipsis
If Doris tries my chili, I will try hers [chili].
-N-ellipsis
Because one is not a shortened version of the other. They are two completely different sentences with different structures, although they do happen to have a lot of the same words.
To clarify this position, I need to draw out the logic of the “this is ellipsis” position. If you’ll pardon the back-and-forth, then as a first step: LynnM, would you say that there is ellipsis in the following sentence: “The ball is red.”? If so, what is omitted?
In “it is private,” the nominal pronoun “it” replaces the noun and works as a noun. It is a complete noun phrase with no ellipsis. It could be written as a sentence in its own, though it would sound clunky.
You’re both missing something crucial. Go to the Wikipedia page and look at all the examples. Every single one of them has a dual, parallel structure. Omitting part of the second half of the structure because it has already been said and therefore implied for future use in the fist half of the structure is ellipsis.
What you two are doing are creating a single structure without a parallel to it. As I and others have said, this is a completely different construct. You need the two-part structure.
SciFiSam, I can’t understand your point at all. Almost all ellipsized phrases can be written as sentences on their own. So what? And if one can’t, so what again?
You’re missing something crucial, which is that in English, N-ellipsis is restricted to a limited set of words:
“Private” is not a number or possessive determiner. Clearly, the OP’s sentence is not an example of N-ellipsis, according to the Wikipedia definition.
There is no ellipsis, just the pronoun “it”, which refers to “this company”:
“This is not a public company; it is private” == “This is not a public company; this company is private.”
Even if it was ellipsis, that doesn’t quite answer the OP’s question, which was (somewhat implicitly), “is there a word for what’s WRONG with this sentence?” There’s nothing grammatically or semantically incorrect with the sentence, other than the comma should be a semicolon (possibly). Stylistically, I’d omit the second clause for unnecessary redundancy.
If there’s any ellipsis, it’s in the first clause: “This [company] is not a public company.” I don’t think that’s ellipsis, though, it’s just a fairly common pronoun substitution (this = this company).
No. They can’t be written as complete grammatical phrases without the preceding phrase. Look at your own examples.
I agree that the N-ellipsis examples all have a parallel structure. You cannot leave something out without first establishing what it is. But they also require the parallel structure for the second clause to make any sense. This is not true of the OP’s example.
If the OP’s example was
“What can I tell you about this company? It is private.”
then the potential parallel construction is not so obvious, and (I think) you would not call this ellipsis.
The fact that the first sentence in the OP has similar content to the latter sentence does not, in the view of the non-ellipsis-ers, magically change the latter sentence() into one with ellipsis. To my ear, the subject-verb-nominative parallel construction you want to impose does not materialize at all, exactly because the passage isn’t written explicitly parallel. Rather, it is a two-sentence construction providing emphasis via an adjective/contra-adjective arrangement. Philosophically (if not definitionally), both adjectives modify the single instance of the word “company”, one directly and one indirectly via the channel provided by the pronoun “it”.
() which is complete on its own both in grammar and in content. The lack of the word “company” in the subject is just standard pronoun behavior.
I was not implying that there was anything wrong with the sentence.I just want to know what that is called grammatically. ‘Blue Sky Steel is not a public company. Blue Sky Steel is private.’
‘Blue Sky Steel is not a public company. Blue Sky Steel is a private company.’
What I am asking is what is it called grammatically. As far as I am aware there are languages which cannot make this construction - ‘Blue Sky Steel is not a public company. Blue Sky Steel is private.’
I am sorry for any confusion.
I’d call it a run-on sentence or a comma splice.
“This is not a public company, it is private” sounds to me like two separate sentences that should be written as two separate sentences (or perhaps spliced with a semi-colon); connecting them with a comma like that isn’t right. (See what I did there?)
ETA: Upon more careful perusal of this thread, I see others have mentioned comma splice too.
But in this example, you don’t need the second comma…
This tangential example seems to be trying to get at the problem of the incomplete comparison – a clearer example would be: “I like chocolate more than Mary.” Does that mean I like chocolate more than I like Mary? Or does it mean I like chocolate more than Mary likes chocolate? This is one kind of ambiguous construct that we were explicitly warned about in one of my English classes.
Why wouldn’t you use a comma there? Without the second comma, the word private appears to be a noun, not an adjective.
To further confuse things:
In TheFreeDictionary.com, their definition of the word absolute includes this grammar-specific sense–see 6.c [bold added]:
- Grammar
a. Of, relating to, or being a word, phrase, or construction that is isolated syntactically from the rest of a sentence, as the referee having finally arrived in The referee having finally arrived, the game began.
b. Of, relating to, or being a transitive verb when its object is implied but not stated. For example, *inspires *in We have a teacher who inspires is an absolute verb.
c. Of, relating to, or being an **adjective **or pronoun that stands alone when the noun it modifies is being implied but not stated. For example, in Theirs were the best, *theirs *is an absolute pronoun and *best *is an absolute adjective.
So, in the similar sentence:
This is not a public company, it is private.
…since “company” is implied, is “private” an absolute adjective?
In one what?
Indeed you do. In the sentence quoted, the principal clause is “This is a private company”. The words “not a public” are a parenthetic interpolation, and need to be marked as such. This is conventionally done with opening and closing commas.
In a totally different direction, perhaps the OP just meant ‘What is it called when you use the adjective or another word as a stand in for the noun?’ and maybe the OP cared nothing about the sentence structure. In that case it would be a metonymy.
It isn’t what I think of a metonymy really (like ‘give us our daily bread’) but I can see it.
Nope. Remember, the sentence the OP asks about is this:
“This is not a public company, it is private.”
Metonymy involves substituting, for a word or phrase, a different word or phrase denoting a property of the thing referred to. So, for example, if a war memorial is inscribed with the dedication “to the fallen”, that’s metonymy. The people who are being memorialised are not directly mentioned. Instead the characteristic of being fallen is mentioned, and we know that the memorial is dedicated to fallen soldiers, or fallen heroes, or whatever.
But in the second limb of the OP, the word which refers to the company is the pronoun “it”. “It” is not a characteristic of the company; it’s just a pronoun which refers to the company.
Or a period, though I agree a semi-colon is a better choice.
J.