DUTCH TELEGRAPHESE

This paper investigates telegraphic style in Dutch. 87 subjects were a sked to write (fictitious) telegrams. Telegraphic structures are mainl y one to four words long and subsentential. Seen from a sentence persp ective, obligatory items are missing. Subject to deletion are articles , pronouns, prepositions, and semantically empty verbs (have/be). Basi c structures are isolated nominal phrases, subjectless participle and adjective constructions, noun-adjective constructions without auxiliar ies, infinitives, and imperatives. These findings are discussed in rel ation to recent work on German telegraphese and Dutch telegraphic regi sters in normals and aphasics. Surprisingly, there seems to be a much closer connection between aphasic ''telegraphic speech'' and telegraph ese in Dutch than there is in German.