אפשר קפה 'May I Some Coffee?' Non-Sentential Utterances in Colloquial Hebrew

Abbreviated utterances of different types are widely integrated into the spoken language, and must therefore form an integral part of its description. Four aspects of abbreviated utterances are examined in this article:

1. 1.   

   Modes of Construction—whether the utterance is a result of omission or of compression

2. 2.   

   Discourse function of the abbreviated utterance

3. 3.   

   Context—does it depend on the linguistic or circumstantial context, or is it context-independent

4. 4.   

   Degree of conventionalization—is it one-of-a-kind, a production phenomenon, does it belong to the domain between production and grammar, is it composed in a fixed pattern of the spoken language and classified as "grammatical," or is it an idiomatic expression, a part of the lexicon of spoken Hebrew.

The initial study presented in this paper suggests that there exists regularity, at least partial, in the combinations and cross-combinations of the four aspects.