This contribution deals with historical approaches to reduction, contraction and ellipsis / elision in verbal phrases. It concentrates on the Germanophone area in the 18 th and early 19 th centuries, where a growing interest in pragmatics-in the modern sense-and also a refinement of syntactic analysis can be observed. These trends fostered both a less normative approach, and a more systematic and advanced analysis of structures generally considered as reduced or as indicating a reduction (participle phrases, infinitive phrases, appositions, conditional mode, etc.). The study, which focuses on several reference texts, traces this evolution, and describes the beginnings of critical thinking concerning the notion of phrasal reduction viewed as "too loose" because it postulates a single phrasal pattern and rejects the idea of averbal utterances, in the modern sense.