Home › Glossary › Letter S

Structural omission

Structure
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The intentional absence of expected formal elements—such as rhyme, punctuation, or stanza breaks—to create tension or innovation.

Detailed Definition
Structural omission is the deliberate exclusion of expected grammatical or formal elements—such as subjects, verbs, or stanza breaks—to create poetic compression, ambiguity, or emphasis; Hemingwayesque minimalism (“Hills like white elephants”) and Dickinson’s truncated syntax exemplify this strategic absence.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shakespeare omits subject in “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war”; Dickinson omits verbs: “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate”; Modernist omission: “Snow. Silence. Footprints.”; Hemingway-style poetic omission: “Hills like white elephants. / Say nothing.”
Additional Notes
Structural omission deliberately leaves out expected elements (e.g., rhyme, stanza break, subject)—creates gaps for reader to fill; used in elliptical poetry to suggest rather than state, enhancing ambiguity.
Also Known As
Formal elision structural gap omitted element deliberate absence Grammatical gap Syntactic deletion
Skip to main content