Ellipsis question..

[ashish-mohan]

Hello ManhattanGMAT instructors,

Please look at the following sentence:

The quality of this pen is better than your pen.

I would think that this is a perfect case of ellipsis and we can easily interpret the above sentence as:

The quality of this pen is better than [quality of] your pen.

Please advice.

Thanks in advance.

[vishal.malik]

Hi, I don't think you can compare quality of one pen to a pen.
You can compare quality of one pen to the quality of the other pen. So the right sentence would be

The quality of this pen is better than that of your pen
-or-
The quality of this pen is better than the quality of your pen

[ashish-mohan]

Would request you to refer to Ron's mail:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/comparisons-involving-ellipsis-t66230.html

Since there is no 'tense shift' or 'ambiguity' in the following sentence:

The quality of this pen is better than your pen.

So, I would think the above sentence is correct and we can interpret the above sentence as:

The quality of this pen is better than [quality of] your pen.

Thanks.

[ashish-mohan]

Would request an instructor to kindly reply.

[mschwrtz]

Hey Ashish,

You're really bulldogging these ellipsis questions :)

Anyway, my best answer to this question is the same as my best answer to your other ellipsis question:

It seems to me that any sentence of the form

The X is better than the Y.

where X and Y are both nouns, would naturally be read as comparing X and Y directly. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if that would be the natural reading for every comparative phrase, but I'm beginning to suspect so. Counterexamples please.

[sam198518]

Hey Ashish,

You're really bulldogging these ellipsis questions :)

Anyway, my best answer to this question is the same as my best answer to your other ellipsis question:

It seems to me that any sentence of the form

The X is better than the Y.

where X and Y are both nouns, would naturally be read as comparing X and Y directly. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure if that would be the natural reading for every comparative phrase, but I'm beginning to suspect so. Counterexamples please.

I agree with you or at least I have not seen counterexamples .

"The quality of this pen is better than quality of your pen." Correct
"The quality of this pen is better than [that of] your pen."Correct
"The quality of this pen is better than your pen." wrong

@Instructors - From what I understand, the easiest way of overcoming ellipsis problem is to put each option and check whether it fits in well, while ensuring that parallelism is correctly maintained - We often cannot elimiate whole phrase or write whole phrase. the correct option would be in between these two options and would fit in well.

[RonPurewal]

Would request you to refer to Ron's mail:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/comparisons-involving-ellipsis-t66230.html

Since there is no 'tense shift' or 'ambiguity' in the following sentence:

The quality of this pen is better than your pen.

the notion of "tense shift" only applies to verbs (as only verbs have tenses), so that idea is irrelevant here.
those two guidelines are used when deciding whether you need to include a verb in the second half of a comparison; they don't apply in cases like this one. as michael said above, if you have a comparison between two nouns, it's easier -- you just have to see whether the comparison makes sense. in the case of your sentence, which compares a level of quality to a pen, the comparison doesn't make sense.