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In reference to my question about the usage of “No offense meant/taken,” I noticed that there are a lot of shortened forms like “No offense meant/taken,” “Your point taken,” “That said,” and “Given that” used in place of statements like “I don’t mean to offend you / I don’t take it for your offense,” “I’d take your point (correctly),” “As I said that,” “Under the given situation (condition, statement, fact, story, and so on).” .”

When did these shortened forms come into currency or vogue? Did they surge because the tide of modern time requires speed and shortened form of expression?

Is there specific grammatical terminology to describe such a “noun+past participle (or passive verb form)," or vice versa contracted construction clause?

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  • In form these remind me of “Objections aside, . . .” or “Late fees notwithstanding, . . .”. – tchrist♦ Dec 11 '12 at 0:05
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    They've always been around in the language; probably you're just noticing them for the first time. See Recency Illusion. – John Lawler Dec 11 '12 at 0:07
  • @John Lawler. Your input on the terms of “recency illusion” and “selective perception” is very informative. It was the typical case of “selective perception” that I gave my heed to 'subject / be / subjunction / whatever Deletion' format for the first time. Barrie England taught me that the phrase, “No offense” appeared in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra, and was recorded in Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’ in 1749. In my case, it was ‘antiquity ignorance’ rather than ‘recency illusion.’ – Yoichi Oishi♦ Dec 11 '12 at 1:02
  • @tchrist. Would you tell me what ‘objection aside’ and ‘late fees notwithstanding” represents for? Does ‘objection aside’ mean ‘I don’t care your objection’? Though there is a headword, ‘brush objection aside,’ I wasn’t able to find ‘objection aside’ alone on google search. – Yoichi Oishi♦ Dec 11 '12 at 22:43
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These are of a number of types, but what they all have in common is that predictable chunks of a sentence have been left out because they are predictable (to native speakers).

In order, with something like the deleted material in boldface:

  1. No offense meant/taken. = No offense was meant (or taken) by what I (or you) just said.

  2. Point taken. = I have heard and understood the point of what you just said.

  3. That said, = Now that that has been said, let me continue in a different vein.
  4. Given that, = Given that topic we just mentioned,

There is no general term for rules that do this, like To be-Deletion, Whiz Deletion, Conjunction Reduction, Conversational Deletion, etc. They are deletion rules, obviously, but far from the only ones.

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    There's one possible "generalisation" that occurs to me (although even if it's true, I doubt it would apply very consistently). All your examples seem consistent with "business meetings" and similar contexts where a relatively dense level of information exchange is usually desirable. In contrast to a whole host of other contexts where we habitually use far more words than necessary. Sometimes maintaining an open channel of communication is more important than whatever actually passes through it. Sometimes we're just giving ourselves time to think of what to say next. Etc. etc. – FumbleFingers Dec 11 '12 at 0:58
  • That sounds right. Certainly they're at home in those contexts, often up to the level of solecism. All these deletion rules operate best in fixed phrases, which most of these are. And such fixity of phrase is a product of a culture, like any other ritual phrase. – John Lawler Dec 11 '12 at 1:23

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