Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Nino Kirvalidze
103
B: No, but she 
will
one day, I’ m sure.
c) With clausal ellipsis in English, individual clause elements may be omitted: es-
pecially common are subject-pronoun omissions (“Doesn’t matter;” “Hope so;” “Can’t help 
you”, etc.). Whole stretches of clausal components may also be omitted: 
“He said he would take early retirement as soon as he could 
and he has (=he has already done it).” 
Another grammatical means of text cohesion is substitution. Substitution is similar 
to ellipsis in the effect it has on the text. It occurs when instead of leaving a word or 
phrase out, as in ellipsis, it is substituted for another, more general word. E.g.: 
A: Which ice-cream would you like? 
B: I would like the pink one. 
In this case, the indefinite pronoun “one” is used instead of repeating “ice-cream”. Like 
ellipsis, substitution operates either at nominal, verbal or clausal level. The items com-
monly used for substitution in English are:
One(s): “I offered him 
a seat
. He said he didn’t want 
one
.” 
Do:
“Did Mary take that letter? She might 
have done
. 
So/not: “Do you need a lift? If 
so
, wait for me; if not, I’ll see 
you there.” 
Same: “She chose the roast duck; I chose 
the same
. 
It should be noted that both ellipsis and substitution assume a lot from the context; 
they proceed on the basis that omitted and substituted elements are easily recoverable, 
and therefore natural in speech situations where a high degree of contextual support is 
available. 
The last grammatical means of text cohesion we would like to focus on are con-
junctions. Conjunctions make grammatical contributions to textuality in a specific way. A 
conjunction does not set off a search backward or forward for its referent, but it does pre-
suppose a textual sequence and signals a relationship between its segments.
It is not at all easy to list definitively all the items that perform the conjunctive 
role in English. Halliday and Hasan have classified English conjunctions (over forty items) 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
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