Elliptical clauses

An elliptical clause is one that leaves out a bit of the sentence that would normally be there. However in many cases, this doesn’t matter - the sentence still makes perfect sense without the extra bit. Here’s a full sentence:

I know that this week will be very busy at work.

Normally, the clause ‘this week will be very busy at work’ needs something to lead into it. In this case, we use the relative pronoun ‘that’ to relate the clause to the first part of the sentence ‘I know’. However, you don’t always need this lead in, we can see when we drop ‘that’ from the sentence:

I know this week will be very busy at work.

This sentence still makes perfect sense when you read it, and has exactly the same meaning. The elliptical clause is, "this week will be very busy at work." You can also get elliptical clauses when you’re comparing two things:

Jason can climb better than Bob can climb.

This sentence is fine. However, we can drop the second ‘can climb’ (shown in bold font) from the sentence and it still makes sense:

Jason can climb better than Bob.

The ‘can climb’ at the end of the first sentence is known as a predicate. By dropping it, we’ve created another elliptical clause - ‘than Bob’. It’s not really a complete clause - it’s got a subject (Bob), but it doesn’t have a verb.

Click here to move on to the next topic: Predicates