A Linguistic Survey on Ellipsis Types in IRIB TV Football Commentary

Ellipsis is a frequent event، which occurs in different linguistic levels. Even though it does not usually affect communication، there are times when ellipsis leads to ambiguity and misunderstanding. In TV football reports، because of the context and previous familiarity with such a match، the reporter continuously omits linguistic units. This study deals with the nature and amount of ellipsis in TV football reports. The corpus includes the last 15 minutes of 12 TV football reports of four famous reporters. Data analysis includes studying the nature and amount of ellipsis in these reports based on Safavi (1390). On the other hand، ellipsis of linguistic categories is studied based on the model proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976، 1987). In this study، ellipsis is categorized in 4 types: ellipsis leading to ambiguity، ellipsis with no effect on communication، which Safavi (1390) calls semantic reduction، ellipsis that distinguishes speech from writing، and ellipsis of optional linguistic units. The study shows that over half of the instances of ellipsis do not lead to any misunderstanding، and because of the nature of football reports، they result in some sort of semantic reduction. On the other hand، studying the types of ellipsis on the syntactic level shows considerable difference from Halliday and Hasan (1976، 1987) who categorize ellipsis in three types of verb phrase، noun phrase and clause ellipsis. Finally، the study shows that classic view towards ellipsis، which categorizes it in two types of text-based and context-based ellipsis، cannot explain instances of ellipsis in TV football reports. The present research categorizes the ellipsis types in TV football reports، and shows failure of the classic view in explaining these instances of ellipsis.