Abstract Ellipsis refers to a linguistic mismatch between sound and meaning. In order to fill the research gap in exploring the cause of ellipsis concerning research methods, the study herein attempts to further this issue with an empirical approach. A complex network approach is used to describe the structural patterns of ellipsis language from a macroscopic perspective and different scales of microscopic granularity. According to previous theoretical foundations on ellipsis, two syntactic network models are established, one is derived from the treebank of spoken conversation in modern Chinese; the other is obtained from the same treebank, but with all its elliptical structures added. Twelve kinds of network measures are used to approach the structural similarities and differences between the two networks. Research results suggested that elliptical structures did not change the network topology extracted from the communication system, nor the relevant importance of the linguistic element for transmitting the information. More specifically, the linguistic elements functioned as good ‘spreaders’, transitivity, connectedness, efficiency, and stability in information transmission of the communication system are not affected by elliptical structures.