“In one of his last novels, the poet Aragon quite appropriately mentioned the idea put forward by a few isolated linguists of the century concerning the intermittence of recollecting and forgetting in the development of language, and the historical role of oblivion which is compensated for by verbal creativeness.Over the centuries, the science of language has more than once addressed the question of ellipsis which manifests itself at different verbal levels: sounds, syntax, and narration. One must admit that for the most part these questions, too, have been elaborated only episodically and fragmentarily. A technique which today receives even less consideration is that of elliptical perception, by which the listener fills in (again on all linguistic levels) whatever has been omitted by him as listener. We have also failed to appreciate properly the subjectivism of the hearer, who fills in the elliptic gaps creatively. Here lies the heart of the issue of disambiguation, which has been the object of considerable debate for the past few years within the science of language.From this angle one of the essential differences between spoken and written language can be seen clearly. The former has a purely temporal character, whereas the latter connects time and space. While the sounds that we hear disappear, when we read we usually have immobile letters before us and the time of the written flow of words is reversible: we can read and re-read, and, what is more, we can be ahead of an event. Anticipation, which is subjective in the listener, becomes objective in the reader, who can read the end of a letter or novel before reading the earlier parts.”