A Contrastive and Comparative Study of Ellipsis in Persian and English

This study attempts to analyze English and Persian research articles in respect to the occurrence of ellipsis as a type of cohesive tie. To this end 20 research articles (10 articles in each language) were analyzed in terms of their elliptical categories. For this purpose, Kavousi Nejad’s early and late taxonomies (1997, 1998) and Quirk et alii, (1985) classification of ellipsis were employed. Another significant objective of this study was to predict the errors Iranian EFL learners are likely to make when they employ English ellipsis in their written and spoken work. The most important find from the present study was that these three models of classification are applicable to Persian and English ellipsis. The other important find was that Persian and English have the same types of ellipsis, the only difference being that one of the types of ellipsis, namely the quasi-ellipsis, is present in English but is absent from Persian. This verifies McCarty’s claim (2005) that ellipsis is probably a universal feature of languages. The final find of this study is that the grammatical options which realize ellipsis in Persian discourse vary markedly from those realized ellipsis in English. It is this variation in the realization of ellipsis which leads to certain errors on the part of Iranian EFL learners.