A Morpheme-based Model of Nonsentential Utterance Production

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to account for non-sentential utterance (NSU) production without assuming the existence of a `syntactically full sentence' for every NSU. The model for NSU production that derives from this study has the following four advantages over the popular `constituent-omis-sion' model: It 1) accounts for the production of NSUs that native speakers variably `reconstruct', 2) explains why in certain contexts pro-drop cannot occur in languages that have morphologically marked subject-verb agreement 3) models the production of NSUs without devising separate production processes for `ellipses' and `fragments', and 4) predicts what constituents have to be present in a given NSU. It also keeps the involvement of syntax {in} NSU production to a minimum.