Ellipsis is to be defined as a family of transformations, with precisely formulated scopes and functions, yielding the isolation of a part of a sentence against the background of a full source sentence. (All languages use ellipsis, under such typical conditions as replies to questions, conjunction of similarly constructed expressions by 'and', etc.). A second type are interjectional nominal expressions, always either as vocatives, or as symptoms of emotional stress or its conventional or rhetorical simulation, of the form "'x'!".
- Weinreich (1963), a pag.141