“Among ellipsis theorists there are two popular ideas about what an ellipsis is made of. On the one hand, it is a garden-variety phrase, similar in all respects to an overt phrase, but not interpreted phonologically. On the other, ellipses are a specialized sort of silent word, maybe along the lines of the silent pronouns that languages like Japanese or Italian are thought to have. This second “proform” approach is appealing as it makes sense of the similarities ellipses have with overt pronominals in finding antecedents from their contexts. If proforms are defined as having denotations that make use of contextual information, then analyzing ellipses as proforms explains this fact about them. And to the extent that the way in which pronouns access contextual information is like the way that ellipses do, we have evidence for equating them.”