Sunday, November 30, 2014

relative clauses - Omission of ‘that is’ in English sentence



In the sentence:
“it is a culture very comfortable with silence”




The “that” and “is” is omitted, anyone know what this is called or why it happens?


Answer



It's called ellipsis, and as a previous commenter has said, it's another way of modifying the noun. Ellipsis is used when there is no risk of the subject being confused (ie the subject stays the same) in order to make the phrase more elegant and to avoid redundancy.


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