A Syntactical Analysis of Elliptical Sentences in “The Witches” Novel by Roald Dahl

This study is entitled ‘A Syntactical Analysis of Elliptical Sentences in “The Witches” Novel by Roald Dahl’. The aims of this study are (1) to find out the types of elliptical sentence in the novel The Witches and (2) to analyze the constituent structure of elliptical sentences in the novel. The data source of this study is taken from The Witch Novel written by Roald Dahl. The data were collected through note taking technique whereas analyzed descriptively by using the theories of Kiss and Alexiadou (2015) related to types of ellipsis and then Brown and Miller (1991) related to the constituent structure. The result shows 130 data out of all types consist of 12 data (9%) of VP-ellipsis, 9 data (7%) of sluicing, 35 data (27%) of NP-ellipsis, 34 data (26%) of fragment answer, 8 data (6%) of stripping, 2 data (2%) of gapping, 5 data (4%) of pseudogapping, 10 data (8%) of modal complement ellipsis, and 15 data (11%) of null complement anaphora. NP-ellipsis has the highest occurrence in this study with 27% out of 130 data in total because the sentences that occurred in the novel specifically deleted the noun phrase and its elements from the constituent structure.