Where does ellipsis collide?

In syntax and semantics, ellipsis is the omission of material that would otherwise be required, where the missing content is understood from the surrounding structure, as in "Jack can play the guitar and Jill can too," with the verb phrase left unspoken but fully interpreted. Merchant's The Syntax of Silence develops the theory of how such unpronounced structure is licensed and recovered, as in sluicing. The referent is grammatically absent but semantically present material, studied through what can be left out and still understood, not a figure of style or a row of dots.[1]

Unit

Omitted syntactic material whose meaning is recovered from context

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied by what may be elided, under which licensing conditions, and how the missing content is reconstructed

In rhetoric, ellipsis is a figure in which words are deliberately left out for compression or effect, trusting the audience to supply them, so that a terse, elliptical phrasing gains force from what it withholds. Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms lists it among the figures of omission. The referent is an intentional stylistic economy of expression, a device of persuasion and compression, related to but distinct from the formal syntactic operation and from the punctuation mark.[2]

Unit

Words intentionally omitted from an expression for effect

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by deliberate omission of words that the reader or listener is expected to supply