Ellipsis and ancient languages. few cases from the pre-roman languages of Italy

Abstract

Ellipsis is a feature of natural language and communication and refers to the intentional or non-intentional omission in a speech or text. As a consequence of redundancy, the expression of a word, a preposition, a verb, a phrase or a sentence becomes unnecessary and is dropped. Despite the numerous contributions from general linguistics, the topic has received limited attention in the field of ancient corpus languages such as Latin, Greek or other languages known through fragmentary evidence. Starting with a few examples taken from the Latin epigraphy, the Author looks for of ellipsis cases also in some of the Pre-Roman fragmentary languages of her knowledge, revisiting older interpretations and suggesting new heuristic scenarios for their analysis. Cases from the Messapic and Etruscan epigraphy are presented.