Abstract

Elliptical structures can be seen as a challenge for grammar theory, grammatical research of individual languages and psycholinguistics. Whereas research on elliptical structures in grammar theory and psycholinguistics is mainly restricted to coordination ellipsis, grammatical research on ellipsis in German covers a much wider range of elliptical structures both in written texts and spoken language. The article argues for a broadening of the psycholinguistic understanding of ellipsis by taking into account different types of text ellipsis revealed by research in German linguistics and by correlating different types of elliptical structures with sub-processes of the understanding of texts (coherence, inference). It shows that the shift of attention to a wider range of types of elliptical structures also leads to new hypotheses of understanding elliptical structures. As the article only offers a first approach to the integration of text understanding and grammatical classification of elliptical structures, it cannot provide an elaborate set of methods for proving the hypotheses. It therefore closes with an appeal to a more extensive collaboration of different linguistic disciplines.