Grammaticality and the minimal verb phrase: Evidence from colloquial registers

The main objective of this project is to explore in a systematic, data-driven and cross-linguistic fashion the morphosyntax of a recently discovered, unique clause type: radically truncated clauses (Halm 2021 ).

Such clauses are radically minimal because, exceptionally, they are spelled out (i.e. uttered) at a very early stage of the derivation (i.e., sentence-building), prior to receiving almost all of the clausal layers that a sentence is supposed to have on top of the minimal verb phrase (VP) itself.

In radically truncated clauses, layers oftense, agreement, mood, modality, aspect, voice and dedicated higher functional projections such focus or negation are missing: what remains is the minimal VP: the verb itself, its internal argument (an object or an unaccusative subject) and verbal particles (if they exist and are VP-internal in a given language).

This minimal VP itself can be the target of adjunction (topicalization, quantifier raising and the adjunction of adverbial adjuncts) resulting in larger structures.Such truncated clauses have so far been neglected since they are only produced in specific, colloquial registers (live speech under intense time pressure, electronic communications), and such registers were difficult to observe and gather data on before the advent of widespread electronic text-based communication.

My objective is i) to systematically collect and rigorously analyse a large amount of data on this construction from a set of typologically distinct languages and ii) to develop insightful theoretical conclusions from this large body of new empirical evidence.The theoretical questions where the study of radically truncated clauses is likely to be illuminating include linearization (or word order, more generally), case assignment, the exact size of nominal arguments, and the tradeoff between grammaticality, communicative efficiency and morphosyntactic effability.