A contrastive and comparative study of ellipsis in Persian and English

This research is an attempt to analyze the English and Persian research articles with regard to the occurrence of ellipsis as a type of cohesive tie. Another significant objective of the study is to predict the errors Iranian EFL learners are likely to make when they use English ellipsis in their written and spoken performance. The most important finding of the present study is that these three models of classification are applicable to Persian and English ellipsis. The other important finding is that Persian and English have the same types of ellipsis, the only difference being that one of the types of ellipsis namely quasi-ellipsis present in English is absent in Persian. This verifies McCarty’s claim (2005) that ellipsis is probably a universal feature of languages. The final finding of the study is that the grammatical options which realize ellipsis in Persian discourse vary markedly from those realizing English ellipsis. It is this variation in the realization of ellipsis which results in certain errors on the part of Iranian EFL learners.