Interrogative sentences
Most interrogative sentences are formed by means of inversion, i.e. by placing the predicate or part of it before the subject. There are the following types of interrogative sentences: - general (Yes/No) questions
special questions
alternative questions
disjunctive questions
Every type of questions has its own features and rules of usage.
Imperative sentences
They are widely used in speech when the speaker induces the person(s) addressed to fulfill an action. This may be done in the form of a command, order, request, irritation, offer, entreaty, etc. The most common type of imperative sentences differs structurally from the declarative and interrogative sentences in several important points. Most imperative sentences normally have no overt grammatical subject.
It is believed that an indefinite compound pronoun can also be used as the subject of an imperative sentence when it precedes the predicative verb.
Everybody stand up please.
Behave yourselves, everybody.
It is easy to confuse the imperative subject in such sentences with a vocative. Whereas the subject always precedes the predicate verb, however, the vocative is a mobile element that occur in final and medial, as well as initial position in the sentence. Another difference is that the vocative, when placed in front position, has a separate tone-unit (typically fall-rise), the subject merely receives ordinary word – stress.
Exclamatory sentences
Exclamatory sentences are primarily used for expressing the speaker’s own feelings or strong emotion (surprise, indignation, incredulity, disgust, ridicule and so on). They are characterized by emphatic intonation in speaking and by an exclamation mark in writing. Any of the three above-mentioned communicative types of sentences can be made exclamatory but in our further discussion we will restrict ourselves to purely exclamatory sentences which do not belong to any of those three types whose basic quality is either declarative or interrogative or imperative with an additional emotional element when they are made exclamatory.
What a shame! How encouraging!
References
1. Blokh M.Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar. – M., 2000. – p.229-236, 261-272
2. Ilyish B.A. The structure of Modern English. – L., 1971. –Ch.26-29, 31
Semantic syntax.Pragmatic aspects of syntax
1. “Semantic explosion”.
2. Proposition
3. Special status of a verbal word.
4. The theory of speech acts.
Terms: semantics, seme, denotatum, proposition, names, predicates, actants, valency, speech act, constatives, performatives, illocutive power, locution, perlocutive effect.
1 In the 50s of the 20th century there was a linguistic process which was called “semantic explosion”, i.e. linguists turn to the meaning of language units which had been investigated only from formal positions. It was the time when componential analysis appeared, introducing the notion “seme” (semantic feature, semantic factor, semantic component) and trying to describe the meaning of great number of words through the combination of limited number of semes (For example, the word bachelor has the set of 4 semantic features: 1) human being, 2)male, 3) adult, 4)unmarried ).
The idea that the found methods of the lexicon investigation can be also applied to syntax began to materialize in linguistic research works in 60s and 70s of the 20th century. It was the period when the ability of the sentence to nominate was discovered. The sentence as a word was considered to be a language sign though the nature of the sentence sign was acknowledged to be different from the nature of word. From the point of view of designation the sentence is more complicated formation and can include words. But the most important difference is that the denotatum of the word is an object, and of the sentence is extralingual situation. The sentence is connected with the situation not directly but through mental essence which is called proposition.
2. Under proposition we understand the typicalized mental reflection of onthological situation, its mental correlate. The ability of a man to form proposition is based on its ability to categorize the apprehended and cognizable world, to divide it into separate classes, to generalize the infinite diversity of its fragments into finite and observable number of types. Coming across a great variety of different situations, a man understands that in the end all of them can be united on the basis of dominating feature into several groups. For example:
Someone performs the action upon somebody/something.(The boy hit the ball; The woman picked up a flower. The man threw his hat away). Though all these sentences indicate different denotational situations, they’ll come up the same proposition.
Another example: He is hungry. The girl is ill. Mother was nervous. Farther was angry. These sentences also come from one proposition which is the mental analogue of similar situations, united by classifying ability of human mind into one type.
Proposition is a binary structure. It consists, from one side, from a relative predicate, which is a mental correlate of relations in reality, and, from the other side – from a number of predicate actants (semantic roles, semantic cases) which are mental correlates of adjective world being in some relation to each other.
As we know sentences can be extended and non-extended, complete and elliptical, simple and composite, compound and complex. Sentences can be complicated by different elements. For realization of the proposition on the word level it is necessary that a special type of a lexeme should be its correlate. In semantic syntax such a correlate is called a name of propositional semantics. Such nouns are not those which denotata are objects with space limits but which denotata are events with time limits and their meaning is very close to verbal. (revolution, simile, attack, explosion, war, negotiations, applause, departure, birth, death and others). On the level of word combination, it’s necessary that it should include the name of propositional semantics. Such word combination is able to nominate not only an event, but also its participants: Tom’s death, the teacher’s departure, the uprising of slaves.
3. During 60-70s of the 20th century there became prominent three basic schools. The first came from the views on semantic value of syntactic structure of the sentence and was based on the idea that syntactic model of a sentence indicates not only its structural type but in some degree characterizes its contents parameters. So, according to this conception the sentence, being structuralized by the model “subject - predicate”, denotes the situation with one participant, in certain mental or physical condition or performing an action not going onto any object (The boy is sleeping; The girl stood up; Tom is well-behaved). If the structure of a sentence looks like “subject – predicate – direct object” in that case the sentence denotes the situation with two participants and the predicate denotes the influence of the subject onto the object (The boy is reading a book; The girl bought an ice-cream; Tom received a letter). The weak points of this theory are that structurally identical sentences in most cases denote different situations as in the number of participants of these situations and also in the view of the semantic roles which they perform and the character of relations which are set between them. Thus, the sentences, of structural type “subject - predicate” which denote the situations in which there are no participants (It rains; It is getting dark.).
The sentences of the type “subject – predicate – direct object” can denote the situations either with two participants (Tom received a letter) or with one participant (Tom received much pleasure) or more than one situation in case of using the names of propositional semantics (A terrorist attack causes death).
The second semantico-syntactical school can be called subject – predicate. It is based on the Aristhotel’s logics according to which a sentence is a lingual form of the judgement, built on the basis of the formula S is P. The application if this approach is rather attractive as it allows to describe the forms of cognition ( gnoseological aspect) by means of language (lingual aspect), reflecting the situation in real world (onthological aspect). But the weak point of this conception is inability to analyse sentences to denote the situation with several participant: Tom sold Mary a book. What feature is prescribed to Tom as the subject of the sentence? How Mary and book being the elements of predicative part characterize Tom or what information do they report about him?
The third predicate – argument approach considers a sentence as lingual representation of proposition whose base structure can be expressed in the form of formula aRb, where a and b are actants, indicating the participants of onthological situation and R-relational predicate that expresses relations between actants.
From the point of view of semantic of the syntax the whole lexicon can be subdivided into two groups of words – names and predicates. Under names we understand not only nouns and pronouns also partially or wholly substantivized parts of speech the main feature of which is the ability to correlate with actants on a propositional level and with participants on the onthological level. Names denote things (in a wide sense) or essensses involved into real or imagery situations.
Predicates is the part of lexicon which is used to denote relations (in wide sense) between things. We can relate propositions, conjunctions, adjectives and, of course, verbs. A special status of verbs is given to them by such feature as valency. Under valency we mean the ability of the verb to combine with several names. The number of names is not random, but is given by the semantics of the verb. For example, the verb to drop can have two names, the first of which usually denotes a doer of the action which is expressed by the verb and the second a certain object being an object of the action. Mary dropped a dog .
The question what part of sentence subject or predicate is a dominated one has been solved and the predicate has been solved and the predicate has been acknowledged as the dominant.