This article proposes a method of analyzing the spontaneous speech of severely agrammatic patients. Such speech typically contains few verbs, articles and pronouns and, in the absence of verbal predicates, lacks normal sentence structures, yet a sympathetic interlocutor can often understand the gist of his/her speech. The method employed here involves the description and analysis of a male patient's video‐recorded conversation with a speech therapist. By studying the output as the result of a desire to communicate with limited syntactic resources, it has been possible to highlight strategies evolved by the patient to compensate for his non‐standard speech. While further research is required into the speech of similarly affected patients, preliminary conclusions seem to point to there being some linguistic mechanisms underlying normal syntactic processing which can be resorted to in such ca