Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, xx Elisabeth Stark / Petra Meier Argument Drop in Swiss WhatsApp Messages A Pilot Study on French and (Swiss) German Résumé : Cete contribution vise à analyser l’omission d’arguments verbaux dans la com- munication par WhatsApp, sur la base d’un corpus nouvellement établi en Suisse. Dans une approche contrastive, dix facteurs structuraux et fonctionnels sont pris en compte pour véri- fer l’infuence de la syntaxe et de facteurs extralinguistiques sur les omissions. Les omissions s’avèrent assez rares (4–18 %), et l’infuence des facteurs extralinguistiques limitée. La distri- bution des omissions est contrainte par les régularités syntaxiques observées par Haegeman (2013) pour les diary subject omissions et l’omission des sujets dans les SMS par Robert-Tissot (2015). Mots-clés: omission du sujet – omission de l’objet – omission du topique – communication mé- diée par ordinateur (CMO) – WhatsApp – périphérie gauche – syntaxe Abstract: Tis contribution aims at describing argument drop in WhatsApp chats, based on the newly established Swiss reference corpus of WhatsApp messages. In a contrastive approach, we examine ten syntactic and functional factors as potential triggers for argument drop of ei- ther a syntactic or an extralinguistic nature. Overall, argument drop is quite rare in WhatsApp messages (4–18 %) and the infuence of extralinguistic factors seems to be rather limited. What is atested instead are structural constraints on argument drop such as those identifed by Hae- geman (2013) for diary subject omissions as well as those identifed by Robert-Tissot (2015) for subject drop in French text messages. Keywords: subject drop – object drop – topic-drop – computer-mediated communication (CMC) – WhatsApp – lef periphery – syntax 1. Introduction Te aim of this contribution is to present the results of our pilot study investigating argument drop in French and (Swiss) German WhatsApp (in the following: WA) mes- sages. It is, to our knowledge, one of the frst investigations on the linguistic properties of this relatively new, but already omnipresent form of mobile electronic communication (see Ueberwasser/Stark 2017 for a short state-of-the-art of WA research) that has prac- tically replaced the older text message (SMS), especially among younger people (see Dürscheid/Frick 2014, also for a comparison between SMS and WA messaging). We will describe both the syntactic and the pragmatic conditions under which verbal argu- ments can be omited in WA messages in the two languages in order to determine the nature of these omissions. We take a contrastive point of view, as French and German,