Structural models of elliptical answers in English-language corporate discourse

Ellipsis has been widely examined in conversational and media discourse, yet its structural realisation in corporate communication has received little systematic attention. Existing research has tended to treat ellipsis either as a syntactic deletion phenomenon or as a cohesive device, leaving unexplored how omission operates in highly regulated, efficiency-oriented forms of interaction. To address this gap the present study analyses the structure of answer ellipsis in English corporate discourse with the aim of identifying recurrent positional models and specify the communicative effects associated with each. The empirical material was drawn from MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarisation, comprising approximately 200 authentic corporate meeting transcripts. Elliptical answers were manually extracted, reconstructed, and classified according to the position of the omitted element relative to the overt constituent. Two stable structural configurations were identified: the pre-positional model, in which the unspoken predicate precedes the visible noun phrase and foregrounds outcomes or decisions, and the post-positional model, in which the predicate follows the overt constituent and foregrounds the actor or responsible participant. The findings demonstrate that ellipsis in corporate discourse functions as a regular and context-sensitive structural mechanism reflecting the genre’s pragmatic orientation toward clarity, efficiency, and accountability. The study contributes to linguistic theory as it introduces positional modelling as a tool for examining the interface between syntax and discourse and offers a methodological framework for future corpus-based research on ellipsis in institutional communication.