Unipartite clauses: A view from spoken Israeli Hebrew

The canonical view of clause (or sentence) requires that it include predication (e.g., Biber et al. 1999: §3.2). Utterances that do not fit into this view because they lack a subject, when not excluded from the syntactic analysis altogether (cf., e.g., Carter and McCarthy 2006: 490), are usually regarded as if a virtual subject is represented in the clause as a zero component or as if an allegedly missing subject has gone through a process of ellipsis. This perception goes back at least to Apollonius Dyscolus (Lallot 1997: 373; see, among many others, Benayoun 2003; Spenader and Hendriks 2005; Winkler 2006). However, this type of structure is so frequent among the world’s languages (Givón 1983) that one wonders whether clauses without subjects are indeed to be viewed as elliptical. The study of spoken languages intensifies this perplexity to a point where some basic notions of grammar may be questioned.