This article examines fragment sentences and imperative clauses in carefully edited journalistic writing, specifically in editorials of The Economist. Fragments (e.g. What to do?) and imperatives (e.g. Take spending cuts as an example) share formal and functional properties, such as being shorter than canonical clauses and typically having non-truth-conditional semantics. As demonstrated in our analysis, both sentence types tend to appear prominently within a paragraph, typically at the beginning or the end. Additionally, within the entire editorial, they are often found in the second paragraph, where the writer presents a contrasting view from the opening paragraph, or in the concluding paragraph. This article argues for considering stylistic properties in the characterisation of grammatical constructions.

This article focuses on two fragmentary constructions in English: why-fragments (WFs), such as Why (deal with) why-fragments?, and Mad Magazine sentences (MMs), such as (Me) paint the house purple? While both types can be equivalent in meaning to their corresponding fully fledged interrogative sentences, they can also be used to convey a specific nuance of scepticism regarding a particular proposition. To explore the specific nuance enriching the canonical interpretation (i.e. equivalent to that of the corresponding complete questions) of WFs and MMs, and their potential constructionalisation in contemporary English, two corpus-based studies were conducted using data from the BNC1994 DS, Spoken BNC2014 and COCA. The results show that MMs seem to be fully constructionalised, while the significant trends attested for WFs indicate an ongoing process of constructionalisation, at least in contemporary British English. The evidence also shows that both may be classed as examples of an umbrella ‘Sceptical Small’ construction.

Successful language-based interaction depends on the reciprocal interplay of two or more speakers. The production of structural fragments rather than ‘full’ clausal units plays a crucial role for this interplay. This article provides an outline of a descriptive framework labeled ‘dual-mind syntax’, which is designed for describing the social signature in spoken syntax. Fragments are not analyzed as deficient and ‘incomplete’ syntactic units, but as a communicative practice used to design structures in a responsive-contingent fashion in social interaction. Based on empirical data coming from recorded natural interactions, it will be shown how speakers use syntactic fragments for coordinating actions and collaborative structure-building and for contributing to the emergence of a structurally integrated, coherent whole.

Fragment answers involve a type of ellipsis that occurs in answers to questions and these answers can be hosted by the negator not (e.g. What was his motive? Not money). The central research questions for such a negative fragment answer concern what licenses the fragment, how we can obtain a sentential meaning from its non-sentential status and what its syntactic structure is. In attempting to answer these questions, there have been two main approaches: deletion-based sentential approaches and surface-oriented, direct interpretation (DI) approaches. This article first discusses attested data of such negated fragment answers that could challenge both directions and argues for a direct interpretation approach in which the interpretation of negative fragments is achieved by discourse machinery. The suggested approach shows that once we have a system that represents structured discourse structures, we could have straightforward mapping relations from a negated fragment answer to its proper propositional meaning.

This study investigates fragments of the type last I heard/checked based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which shows a steep increase in frequency for this construction in recent decades. Syntactically, ‘last I fragments’ are disjuncts that are positionally mobile with respect to their host clause and their ‘elliptical’ form can be linked to different ‘full’ forms, viz. specificational sentences and temporal adjuncts. Functionally, their underlying evidential meaning gives rise to different, more specific discourse functions depending on contextual use: viz. downtoner, booster and ironic use. A comparison with unreduced (full) forms shows that these fragments are more likely to have evidential meaning, with reduced form thus acting as an important functional signal. Finally, it is argued that their grammatical status is best captured by a constructional account, which identifies them as constructionalizing units, rather than a simple ellipsis account.

We suggest a novel theoretical analysis of what is known as the reactive what-x construction. This construction, which has recently been noticed and described in Põldvere & Paradis (2019, 2020), has primarily clarificational properties and requires the presence of an antecedent in the preceding context. We begin by summarizing its syntactic properties and main functions, based on data drawn from the London–Lund Corpora of spoken British English, and then address a pattern that has escaped notice thus far, i.e. that the majority of the instances of this construction feature a type of ellipsis known as fragments. Departing from the analysis articulated in Põldvere & Paradis (2020), we present one that captures the elliptical properties of the reactive what-x construction by assimilating it to two classes of fragments: those serving as reprise utterances and those serving as direct utterances. Our analysis relies on Ginzburg & Sag's (2000) detailed analysis of reprise and direct fragments couched within a non-sententialist approach to ellipsis. This allows us to analyze the reactive what-x construction as a type of an in-situ interrogative clause whose elliptical properties are licensed by a version of the constraint Ginzburg & Sag (2000) use to license fragments.