orphan
: orphan in ellipsis
This (relatively rarely used) function is required when ellipsis of a head word results in a promoted word taking a dependent whose function would be determined by the missing head. English examples for this relations are sentences such as:
Mary ate the cake, but John the cookies.
In this case, the absence of a second ‘ate’ forces us to consider two conflicting subjects and objects for the first ‘ate’. The solution is to connect John as conj
to ate. To avoid treating ‘cookies’ as the object of ‘John’, the orphan relation is used instead. Coptic examples work using the same logic:
The second ‘says’ is missing, meaning the subject ‘another one’ will be promoted to take its place. However attaching the complement clause of the missing ‘say’ as ccomp
to ‘another one’ would be misleading. We therefore use the orphan
relation.
orphan in other languages: [bm] [cop] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [fi] [fr] [fro] [ga] [gsw] [hy] [it] [kk] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ro] [ru] [sl] [sv] [swl] [tr] [u] [vi] [xcl] [yue] [zh]