Other structures with omission

405

Other structures which allow us to shorten a sentence by omitting repeated matter are coordinated
Structures, non-finite clauses, and verbless clauses.

All these structures will be discussed in Part Four, so here we merely give a few examples of the
varied types of omission that occur in them, showing how these provide briefer alternatives to
substitution and repetition.

Omission through coordination

406

(The elements which are or can be omitted in coordination are in italic.)

Peter ate the food but left the drink. (='Peter ate the food, but he left the drink.")

We are flying to Madrid tonight, and to Athens next week. (='Tonight we are flying to Madrid; next
week we are flying to Athens.")

Not only classical, but popular art is being seriously studied these days.

(='Classical art is being seriously studied these days; popularart is, (too).")

Either West Germany or Holland will win the World Cup.

(='West Germany will win the World Cup; or (else) Holland will do so.")

John washes and irons his own shirts. (='John washes his own shirts he irons them. (too))

In general, the same omissions cannot be made when one of the clauses is

subordinate to the others.

Compare: He was exhausted and went to sleep.

but not: He was so exhausted that went to sleep.

But there are a few cases where subclauses follow the coordinate clause pattern:

He ate the fruit, though not the nuts..

Omission in non-finite clauses

407

Non-finite clauses (see 515) have no operator, and most of them have no con- junction or subject.
Thus in comparison with finite subclauses they are more economical and avoid repetition; ing-
clauses and -ed clauses, probably for this reason, are particularly favoured in (formal or written)
styles of English.

We shall illustrate these points with equivalent finite clauses,

to-INFINITIVE CLAUSE: I hope to be present.

(='I hope that I shall be present.")

-ing CLAUSE:

Living in the country, we had few social visits.

(='Since we lived in the country,...")

-ed CLAUSE: The man injured by the bullet was taken to hospital. (='The man who was injured by the
bullet..."

408

The same applies to non-finite clauses introduced by a subordinator:

-ing CLAUSE: He wrote his greatest novel while working as an ordinary seaman.

(=... while he was working as an ordinary seaman')

-ed CLAUSE: Though defeated, he remained a popular leader. (='Though he had been defeated...')

Omission in verbless clauses

409
Verbless clauses (see 516) have no verb and usually no subject:

Whether right or wrong, he usually wins the argument.

(="Whether he is right or wrong...

A man of few words, Uncle George declined to express an opinion.

(Being a man of few words / As he was a man of few words...")

Verbless clauses, like participial clauses, often belong to a more (formal) style.

Note Not all subordinators can introduce participial and verbless clauses.

For ex- ample, because, as, and since (as conjunctions of reason) cannot. Notice the difference, in
this connection, between since denoting time and since denoting reason

TIME

Since he left school,

Since leaving school, he's had several different jobs.

REASON

Since you know the answer,

Since knowing the answer, why didn’t you speak up?

Presenting and focusing information

410
We now deal with the various ways in which meanings can be presented and arranged for effective
communication. For a message to be properly understood,

a the message has to be cut up into individual pieces of information

b the ideas have to be given the right emphasis.

c the ideas have to be put in the right order .

Pieces of information
411
In (written) English, a PIECE OF INFORMATION can be defined as a piece of language which is
separated from what goes before and from what follows by punctuation marks (..:: ?!), and which
does not itself contain any punctuation marks. In (spoken) English, a piece of information can be
defined as a tone unit (see 36), le a unit of intonation containing a nucleus. Notice the difference, in
(written) English, between:

Peter has a charming wife and two children. [1]

Peter has a charming wife; he also has two children. [2]

In a sense, as we show in 375-85, [1] and [2] 'mean the same', but [1] presents the message as ONE
piece of information, while [2] presents it as two pieces of information, separated by a punctuation
mark (:). In (speech), the same contrast is seen in:

Peter has a charming wife and two children

(ONE TONE UNIT) [1a]

Peter has a charming wife | he also has two children]

(TWO TONE UNITS)[2a]

Dividing the message into tone units

412
There is no exact match between punctuation in <writing) and tone units in <speech). Speech is
more variable in its structuring of information than writing. Cutting up speech into tone units
depends on such things as the speed at which you are speaking, what emphasis you want to give to
parts of the message, and the length of grammatical units. A single sentence may have just one tone
unit, like [la]; but when the length of a sentence goes beyond a certain point. (say roughly ten
words), it is difficult not to split it into two or more separate pieces of information:

|The man told us we could park it here.|

|The man told us | we could park it at the railway station.|

|The man told us | we could park it in the street over there.|

413
For guidance, the following general rules are useful:

(A) Use a single tone unit for each sentence, except in the circumstances (B)-(G) below.

(B) If a sentence begins with a clause or adverbial phrase, give the clause or adverbial element a
separate tone unit:

The year before last, | we spent two weeks in Wales.|

(This does not usually apply when the adverbial is a fronted topic, see

426-9.)

(C) If a sentence contains a non-restrictive postmodifier (see 100), eg a non-

restrictive relative clause (see 795), give the postmodifier a separate tone unit:

|The blue whale | which is the world's largest animal| has been hunted almost to extinction.|

(D) Similarly, give any medial phrase or clause a separate tone unit:

|And that |in short | is why I refused.|

(E) A vocative or linking adverb usually has its own tone unit (or at least ends a tone unit):

|Mary| are you coming? |

|The police| however |thought he was guilty. |

(F) Give a separate tone unit to a clause or long noun phrase acting as subject:

|What we need| is plenty of time. |

(G) If two or more clauses are coordinated, give them each a separate tone

unit:

|He opened the door| and walked straight in.|

End-focus and contrastive focus

414
The nucleus is the most important part of a tone unit: it marks the FOCUS OF INFORMATION, or the
part of the unit to which the speaker especially draws the hearer's attention. Normally, the nucleus
is at the end of the tone unit; or, to be more precise, on the last major-class word (noun, main verb,
adjective, or ad- verb, see 884) in the tone unit. Which syllable of the word is stressed, if it has more
than one syllable, is determined by ordinary conventions of word stress:

to'day, 'working, 'photograph, conver'sation, etc.

This neutral position of the nucleus, which you see in all the examples in 413, we call END-FOCUS.

Note
Constructions consisting of two or more nouns together often behave, for stress purposes, like a
single word (ie like a noun compound), with the main stress on the first noun: 'export records:
'building plan; 'traffic problem. (But contrast town 'hall, country 'house, lawn 'tennis etc.)

415
But in other cases you may shift the nucleus to an earlier part of the tone unit. You may do this when
you want to draw attention to an earlier part of the tone unit, usually to contrast it with something
already mentioned, or understood in the context. For this reason, we call earlier placing of the
nucleus CONTRASTIVE FOCUS. Here are some examples:

|One of the parcels has arrived.| (but the other one hasn't) [3]

(Was Dylan Thomas married in Swansea?) |No, | but he was born in Swansea. |[4]

I hear you're painting the kitchen blue.) |No, | I'm painting the children's bedroom blue. |[5]

(Have you ever driven a sports car?) | Yes, | I've often driven one.| [6]

In cases like [3] and [4], contrastive meaning is signalled by a fall-rise tone (see 154 137), with a fall
on the nucleus and a rise on the last stressed syllable in the tone unit. In other sentences, there may
be a double contrast, each contrast indicated by its own nucleus: Her father is Austrian, | but her
mother is French.

416
Sometimes contrastive focus draws attention to a whole phrase (eg the children's bedroom in [5]): at
other times, it is a single word that receives the focus (eg often in [6]). Even words like personal
pronouns, prepositions, and auxiliaries, which are not normally stressed at all, can receive nuclear
stress for special contrastive purposes:

(I've never been to Paris) | but I will go there | some day. [7]

(A) (What did John say to Mary?)

(B) He was speaking to me (not to Mary). [8]

(I know she works with John) | but who does she work for? [9]

(I don't know if you mean to see Peter.) | but if you see him (please give him my good wishes). [10]

In some cases, eg [8] and [9], contrastive focus comes later rather than earlier than normal end-
focus. Thus the normal way to say Who does he work for? [9] would be with focus on the verb, not
the preposition:

Who does he work for?

In exceptional cases, contrastive stress in a word of more than one syllable may shift to a syllable
which does not normally have word stress. For example, if you to make a contrast between the two
words normally pronounced bureaucracy and au'tocracy, you may do so as follows:

|I'm afraid that bureaucracy | can be worse than autocracy. |