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Ellipsis
the omission in speech or text of an implied linguistic unit. The dropped unit may be a sound or sound combination; usually this occurs in colloquial speech, for example, kada for kogda (“when”) or mozhbyt’ for mozhet byt’ (“maybe”).
A word or word combination may be omitted if it is clear from the context, such as U ottsa byl bol’shoi pis’mennyi stol, a u syna malen’kii (“The father had a large desk, and his son a small one”), or if it constitutes a familiar expression, such as Ty v liubom sluchae vyidesh’ sukhim (iz vody) (“You will manage to come out dry [from the water] in any case”).
The dropped unit may be suggested by the meaning or grammatical form of other words: Ty na rabotu (idesh’)? (“Are you [going] to work?”); (Ia) sizhu za reshetkoi v temnitse syroi . . . (“[I] am sitting behind the bars of a dank dungeon . . . .”—Pushkin). The dropped unit may be clear from the situation: Mne chernyi (kofe, khleb . . .) (“I’ll take black [coffee, bread . . .]”).
The ellipsis of a syntactic unit that has a double meaning may be strikingly expressive and is used as a figure of speech: Ia za svechku, svechka—vpechku (“I [grabbed for] the candle, but the candle [jumped] into the stove”—K. Chukovskii).
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