Root infinitives on Twitter

Root Infinitives are said to occur in limited cases in German (the same is claimed for English, see for example Huddleston and Pullum 2002): in exclamative 'Mad Magazine'-readings (1a), in subjectless root wh-clauses (1b) or (usually also subjectless) non-wh infinitives (1c) which are interpreted as imperatives (Repp 2009). Existing analyses of another genre, diary ellipsis, have it that subjects and auxiliaries can be elided, but that there can be no root infinitives. While sentences like (2c) could potentially lend themselves to such an analysis, sentences like (2a,b) do not, since they contain unambiguous infinitives ('laufen', 'wollen', 'rausbringen', 'wiederfinden'). Note that the punctuation indicates that the authors think of these utterances as full clauses. Reis proposes a modal analysis of the meaning of German wh-infinitives like (1b), based on an analysis for English wh-infinitives by Bhatt (2000).