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1 results

  • The special position of fragments and imperatives in polished prose: data from The Economist editorials

  • BERT CAPPELLE
  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 28 / Issue 3 / September 2024
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 January 2025, pp. 465-490
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  • 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.