[mturk]

Sure -- the other comments have done a good job of explaining my usage of "sentence fragment" (which was what we referred to it as in my composition classes in high school, although I now see this may have been more colloquial than I realized) but the fragment in question was of the form:

"A special thanks to [name] for [carefully proofreading]."

What really got me is that I probably even thought I had written "goes to" or something, since that (with the verb) is the type of construction I often use!

[2143]

As a non-native speaker, I have no idea what's wrong with the sentence (fragment?) you wrote.

[hunter2_]

When removing extraneous modifiers, it takes the form of "[article] [subject]" -- "A thanks."

Similar constructions would be "A cucumber." "The house."

It's a fragment, not a complete sentence, because it lacks a predicate. Had GP included the word "goes" as discussed, it would've created a predicate.

> predicates are a necessary part of English sentence structure [0]

[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/predicate/