[mturk]

My now-spouse, then-new-SO, proofread my thesis for grammar, clarity, etc. At the time, I had written my acknowledgments, but after the proofreading, I added a thanks to her to it at the end just before submitting it and finalizing it.

But, I was a bit careless, and my post-proofreading addition, designed to thank her for improving and checking my grammar, ... was a sentence fragment.

[mauvehaus]

It's always the late additions that get you. Our wedding favor to our guests was a cookbook of recipes we collected with the RSVPs[0]. About the last thing I added was an About the Recipes page which included the following paragraph:

We have edited recipes for length and for typographic consistency, but we've done a bad job of it. This is in part because we did much of the editing with a drink in one hand; if we hadn't it never would have gotten done. We hope that we've successfully retained the color and character you put into the recipe while making the finished cookbook look at least somewhat consistent rhoughout.

[0] I cannot begin to describe how much work this was. If you're reading this and thinking "how lovely", you've been warned.

[gerdesj]

Would you mind sharing that fragment?

I'm a 53 year old en_GB speaker and writer and long term owner of a copy of "Usage and abusage: A Guide to Good English" and long ago decided to boot the bloody thing into the long grass.

You and I (and every other interaction involving English) decide how English is spoken or written. At least Partridge uses the term "guide" for his treatise. There is no such thing as a pure English, finely polished and honed to a razor edge and delivered with equanimity. I think the best we can all hope for is to be mutually understood.

Given all that, I don't think I've ever heard of a "sentence fragment". It sounds like a grammar sin, probably funded by the lower circles of hell. I attended several very posh schools in the UK as well as the standard education system hereabouts and I don't recall that term being used. Perhaps I was asleep at the time.

I've done a quick search and this is dreadfully fluffy: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/mistake-of-the-month-sentence...

I'd love to hear what "sentence fragment" really means: to whom and why.

[leplen]

English sentences need a subject and a verb. Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this).

[gerdesj]

"Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this)."

English is generally "SVO" but that is largely optional. There are no rules of grammar except for the rules of grammar that are in play at a particular time. No language is a lepidopterist's fantasy of a pinned downed beauty. Language is unconstrained and free to flap its fractal wings at will.

Your "sentence fragment" is simply grammatically incorrect. You seem to have accidentally morphed "misses" into "missing". To miss is a verb. Another possibility is you might have forgotten to deploy "is" prior to "missing". Again, that is simply a grammatical faux pas and not a weird language form.

In both cases your parenthesised, aside clause, is false - t'ain't so.

[DiscourseFan]

That’s only intellible if I think you’re a native speaker of a pro-drop language where the copulative is dropped. Because of the structure of the English, it is ambiguous what “missing” here is appositional to, since participial forms in pro-drop languages are usually conjugated according to their case, number, and gender (at least among the Indo-European languages), so I can’t tell if the fragment is missing a sentence or if the verb is missing a fragment (or other, numerous possible interpretations).

Its not a bad thing to be wrong, since, when it comes to expression, one can never be right. But it is still better to know the best way to be wrong, a wrong way that cannot be made right. And then you yourself will have created something entirely new.

[cratermoon]

This sentence no verb.

[gerdesj]

"This sentence no verb."

... is bollocks! Yet, I can see a shimmering phantasm of "has" ... post sentence.

If you are going to create a thing, it needs to be consistent within the framework it tries to describe itself.

A "sentence fragment", whatever that is, needs to be grammatically correct (for a given value of correct) but not simply be a spelling mistake or just plain old bollocks.

I can punch holes into a piece of A4 and call the result "a paper fragment". There is no need to define a term for "paper, useless for printing on".

[BlackFly]

What nonsense!

That is probably the better example of a perfectly good sentence fragment. There are many others in spoken English.

[zogrodea]

I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment, but the example given doesn't quite sit right with me.

"Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this)."

vs

"Often a sentence fragment is missing a verb (like this)."

We still have short sentences which seem to make sense without a verb. Is the following grammatically incorrect? "Hello there!"

[Cthulhu_]

"Spoken English" being the key phrase there; if you use spoken English in a formal document or letter, it may reflect poorly on you.

Comment sections on the internets - and acknowledgements - are a bit milder on those grammar rules I'm sure.

[gerdesj]

"What nonsense"

That's an example of idiom. The word "what" is overloaded to mean "that is" - for dramatic emphasis.

The verb "to be" is often overloaded or implied in many languages. For example "quelle surprise" in French.

Perhaps we are dealing with a point of vocabulary. When I first learned Latin, we had "Civis Romanus" and "Mentor" as initial textbooks (kivvy was red and mental was blue). Later on a green book was added and it dealt with idiom (idia/idioms?) and I think that was its name, but I had moved on by then!

[mturk]

Sure -- the other comments have done a good job of explaining my usage of "sentence fragment" (which was what we referred to it as in my composition classes in high school, although I now see this may have been more colloquial than I realized) but the fragment in question was of the form:

"A special thanks to [name] for [carefully proofreading]."

What really got me is that I probably even thought I had written "goes to" or something, since that (with the verb) is the type of construction I often use!

[2143]

As a non-native speaker, I have no idea what's wrong with the sentence (fragment?) you wrote.

[hunter2_]

When removing extraneous modifiers, it takes the form of "[article] [subject]" -- "A thanks."

Similar constructions would be "A cucumber." "The house."

It's a fragment, not a complete sentence, because it lacks a predicate. Had GP included the word "goes" as discussed, it would've created a predicate.

> predicates are a necessary part of English sentence structure [0]

[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/predicate/

[NeoTar]

Possibly you may have come across it under the term an 'incomplete sentence' - as others have stated, it's a set of words which don't form a complete thought.

I'm also a en_gb speaker, and I'd never heard of the term until my teen years using the Microsoft Word grammar checker.

[Loughla]

That is delicious.

I'm absolutely certain that she loved it. I would've. That's too funny not to.

[JadeNB]

Fragments. Damn good device.

https://www.consc.net/misc/moser.html

[euroderf]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ?