This paper describes an analysis of telegraphic fragments as regular structures (not errors) handled by minimal extensions to a system designed for processing the standard language. The modular approach which has been implemented in the Unisys natural language processing system PUNDIT is based on a division of labor in which syntax regulates the occurrence and distribution of elided elements, and semantics and pragmatics use the system's standard mechanisms to interpret them.

This paper describes the SDC PUNDIT, (Prolog UNDerstands Integrated Text), system for processing natural language messages.1 PUNDIT, written in Prolog, is a highly modular system consisting of distinct syntactic, semantic and pragmatics components.Each component draws on one or more sets of data, including a lexicon, a broad-coverage grammar of EngLish, semantic verb decompositions, rules mapping between syntactic and semantic constituents, and a domain model.This paper discusses the communication between the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic modules that is necessary for making implicit linguistic information explicit.The key is letting syntax and semantics recognize missing linguistic entities as implicit entities, so that they can be labelled as such, and referenee resolution can be directed to find specific referents for the entities.In this way the task of making implicit linguistic information explicit becomes a subset of the tasks performed by reference resolution.The success of this approach is dependent on marking missing syntactic constituents as elided and missing semantic roles as ESSENTIAL so that reference resolution can know when to look for referents.