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THE SOURCE: NY times

Poland sent soldiers to fight alongside Americans in Iraq, but is nonetheless one of the few countries still hosting North Korean workers over Washington's objections.

Why doesn’t the preposition “it” get placed before "is"? To make it go like this:

But it is nonetheless...

Is it a kind of ellipsis?

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3 Answers 3

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The two verb phrases sent soldiers... and is nonetheless... are conjoined by but and share the subject, Poland; parse it like this:

         sent soldiers ...
 Poland  but
         is nonetheless ...

Compare:

         went to bed 
   John  but
         could not sleep.
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  • 2
    Couldn’t we use the pronoun to make two independent clause? John went to bed, but he couldn’t sleep
    – user59167
    Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 2:54
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    @StevanSlewa: They could. They didn't.
    – user2357112
    Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 3:57
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    @user2357112 sorry, I didn’t understand what tried to imply?
    – user59167
    Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 9:03
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    They could use the pronoun but they didn't use it (for whatever reason).
    – Drossel
    Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 10:25
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    @StevanSlewa: That is, yes, they could use the pronoun, but they aren't required to. Leaving it out is also allowed.
    – T.J. Crowder
    Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 10:44
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It probably makes more sense to treat this as a kind of parallelling, rather than ellipsis.

The two sentences are

Poland sent soldiers to fight alongside Americans in Iraq
Poland is nonetheless one of the few countries still hosting North Korean workers over Washington's objections.

Ellipsis and parallelling shorten a sentence by removing duplicated word sequences: in this case, the word Poland. An alternative way of shortening the sentence is to replace the second occurrence of Poland by it. The use of a pronoun is an alternative method of shortening the sentence, not a precursor to applying ellipsis or parallelling. The omitted word when the sentences are parallelled is therefore Poland, not it.

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  • Why is that? It here gives the meaning of poland. So he wrote poland then would use “it” to refer to. How could it be paralleled?
    – user59167
    Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 2:25
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    Ellipsis and paralleling shorten a sentence by omitting word sequences that match exactly: Poland/Poland, not Poland/it.. Using a pronoun instead of a noun is an alternative way of shortening a sentence, rather than an initial step towad ellipsis or parallelling.
    – JavaLatte
    Commented Jan 14, 2018 at 5:14
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Yes, it's a kind of ellipsis for style. It doesn't change the meaning.

Other examples:

She was top of her high school class, but (she) isn't planning to go to college.

The computer can do many trillions of calculations per second, but (it) can't dream.

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