Tracking Participants By Not Mentioning Them

Martin & Rose (2007: 178-9):

One part of the picture we haven’t covered yet, but which is relevant here is the use of ellipsis as a tracking device. In the following example, Helena doesn’t actually use a pronoun to tell us who abruptly muttered and who drove off, but we know perfectly well who she means because English can refer to participants by leaving them out:

Suddenly, at strange times, they would become restless.
Ø Abruptly mutter the feared word 'trip'
and Ø drive off.

This kind of implicit reference is known as ellipsis. In many languages (e.g. Spanish, Japanese), ellipsis of this kind is far more common than pronouns; but English more often likes its pronouns there (for reasons outlined in Chapter 7, section 7.3). Once again here, Helena’s punctuation isn’t quite the norm for tracking by ellipsis of this kind; in English this would be more common within rather than between sentences.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the claim here is that omitting participants is a way of tracking them. A more efficient way of tracking them might be to include them in the text.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, reference and ellipsis are very different types of relation. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 641-2):

We remarked earlier that ellipsis is a relationship at the lexicogrammatical level: the meaning is ‘go back and retrieve the missing words’. Hence the missing words must be grammatically appropriate; and they can be inserted in place. This is not the case with reference, where, since the relationship is a semantic one, there is no grammatical constraint (the class of the reference item need not match that of what it presumes), and one cannot normally insert the presumed element. Reference, for the same reason, can reach back a long way in the text and extend over a long passage, whereas ellipsis is largely limited to the immediately preceding clause.

[3] To be clear, §7.3 'Speech Function And Mood' (pp227-31) does not explain why English "likes its pronouns" more than ellipsis, as will be seen when that section is examined.