Substitution
A word is not omitted, as in ellipsis, but is substituted for another, more general word. For example, "Which ice-cream would you like?" – "I would like the pink one" where "one" is used instead of repeating "ice-cream." This works in a similar way to pronouns, which replace the noun. For example, 'Ice-cream' is a noun, and its pronoun could be 'It'. 'I dropped the ice-cream because it was dirty'. – Replacing the noun for a pronoun. "I dropped the green ice-cream. It was the only one I had'. – the second sentence contains the pronoun (It), and the substitution (one). One should not mix up the two because they both serve different purposes: one to link back and one to replace.
Read more about this topic: Cohesion (linguistics)
Famous quotes containing the word substitution:
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)
“Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described as saying, I A—.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)