Colloquial conversation is full of “reduced” structures or ellipsis, that is of utterances that do not form a full sentence. To illustrate, when speakers wish to give an evaluation like in the examples below, they can utter a full sentence, as in (1), or they can drop the first element in the sentence, as in (2), or they just utter an evaluating word, which in our examples is an adjective, see (3). Structures like the one in (2) are said to involve topic drop. Structures like the one in (3) are often called fragments. Prima facie there is no functional difference between the three structures.

In our current research, we are exploring how the choice between full sentences and different kinds of reduced structures is conditioned. It is already known that in structures with adjectives the meaning of the adjective plays an important role (Reich 2017): In contrast to the evaluative adjectives in our examples, descriptive adjectives like yellow or  triangular do not often occur in fragments. This fact correlates with the observation that descriptive adjectives typically combine with (dropped) subjects that refer to an individual or object, as in Das ist grün ‘that is green’, where das might refer to a couch. Evaluative adjectives, in contrast, typically combine with (dropped) subjects that refer to a proposition, roughly a state of affairs: (1) through (3) might be evaluations of a state of affairs. The goal of our research is to find all the factors that contribute to the choice between full or reduced structures, in particular factors that concern to the conversational interaction itself.