intonation contour of the underlying grammatical sentence are
preserved, supplying confirmation to the interpretation and as-
surance that an appeal to the grammatically tacit is something
more than the linguist's legerdemain. If, then--as Gunter has
shown--the right pair parts are aptly chosen, answers with very
strange surface structures can be shown to be understandable,
and what seemed anything but a sentence can be coerced into
grammatical form and be the better off for it. What is "said" is
obscure; what is "meant" is obvious and clear:

A: "Who can see whom?"

B: "The man the boy." [ Gunter 1974:17]

The same argument can be made about dangling or interrupted
sentences, false starts, ungrammatical usage, and other apparent
deviations from grammatical propriety.

Note that answers can take not only a truncated verbal form
but also a wholly nonverbal form, in this case a gesture serving
solely as a substitute--an "emblem," to use Paul Ekman's ter-
minology ( 1969:63-68)--for lexical materials. To the question
"What time is it?" the holding up of five fingers may do as well
as words, even better in a noisy room. A semantically meaningful
question is still being satisfied by means of a semantically mean-
ingful answer.

Second, we can describe embedding and "side-sequence"
( Jefferson 1972) features, whereby a question is not followed
directly by an answer to it, but by another question meant
to be seen as holding off proper completion for an exigent
moment:

or even:

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