#Syntax

  Recently, there has been a fascinating linguistic phenomenon: that of the unmoored "hashtag statement". Hashtags bubbled into the zeitgeist along with the explosion of Twitter and Instagram, wherein prepending words and phrases (with spaces removed) with a hashtag would allow for posts to be easily searchable. Since, it has made headroom into non-social-media online interaction and even speech (usually less ironically than the speaker intends it to be), where it would represent a related thought without wasting so much as a predicate on expressing it, e.g., "locked out again #strugs". Can this odd new branch of English speech be parsed into a conventional syntax tree?

  My first thought was to create a phrase, the Hashtag Phrase, or "HP". However, I soon realized that the hashtag statement functions more accurately as it's own clause when it is not simply a 1-to-1 replacement with a well-understood phrase. I will look into these two usages, then explain the rationale for the idea of the Hashtag Clause.

  The first usage is as a direct replacement of a phrase, almost always a Verb Phrase or a Noun Phrase. For example, in the statement "I can't wait for #SuperBowl2016 to come around!", the hashtag statement is parsed as a Noun Phrase as simply Super Bowl 2016. A slightly less common usage would be the statement "I #ski all of the time!", where the hashtag phrase is parsed as a Verb Phrase, again being parsed as the phrase with the hashtag removed.

  The second manner of usage is as an encapsulation of the preceding statement, as in, "This is crazy #coachella!" (as an aside, the exclamation point may go before the hashtag statement). It is to say that these concepts are somehow related, where the context necessary to understand why often serves to implicitly reinforce ingroup bonds. Using hashtags in this manner, not solely online, allows for the expression of a related thought in an obvious way without some perhaps laborious connective sentence, e.g. "This is crazy! I am at Coachella!" Like any other clause, it may be arbitrarily long, though it has a somewhat unique rule: it must go at the end of a sentence, or, much more rarely, between parenthesis. 

  The English language should permit terse expression where it is commonly used and the rules for its usage are well-defined. Thus linguist should embrace this sentence caboose, the Hashtag Clause #syntax #linguistics1.