The Communicative Types of Sentences

According to the role in the process of communication sentences are divided into 4 types: declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory sentences. These types differ in the aim of communication and express statements, questions, commands and exclamations respectively.

Structural Classification of Sentences

Every sentence in language has its structure depending on definite syntactic functions which are performed by words in a sentence. As a rule, English sentences contain words or groups of words functioning as the subject and the predicate – the principal parts in the sentence. Words performing all other functions in the sentence are called the secondary parts. From the point of view of their structure and their communicative value sentences may be regarded as:

Sentence Simple

One-member Two-member

Complete Incomplete

Composite

Complex Compound

Complete Incomplete

Simple Sentence

Simple sentence contains only 1 subject-predicate unit and composite sentence – more than one. Subject-predicate units that form composite sentences are called clauses. Two-member sentence contains two main parts, while one-member sentence has only one principal part, which is neither the subject nor the predicate. In OE impersonal sentences may be one-member sentences: hū lomp ēow in lāde? как путешествовалось вам в пути?

Complete and incomplete sentences are distinguished by the presence or absence of word-forms in the principal positions of two-member sentences. In a complete sentence both the principal positions are filled with word-forms. When did you arrive ? I came straight here. In an incomplete (elliptical) sentence one or both of the main positions are not filled, but can be easily supplied from the context: Ready? Cheerful, aren’t you?

In OE only one principal part – namely the subject can be missed and is to be supplied from the context: ālēdon þā lēofne þēoden on scipe (they) laid then their beloved leader on a ship.

In OE there are sentences introduced by the subject hit and by the adverbial modifier þær, which to some extent lose their own meaning. These are the beginnings of sentences with a “formal subject” it and with the phrase there is.

Negation

Negative words are freely used in OE and their number in a sentence is not limited: nān man ne būde benorđan him no man lived north of him.

Parts of a Sentence

Every sentence can be divided into components which are called parts of a sentence. They are: Subject, Predicate, Object dir, Object indir, Adverbial Modifier, Direct Address, Apposition.

The Subject

The subject is a word which names the person, object or phenomenon the sentence informs us about. There are various ways of expressing the subject in OE. The most usual are by a Noun, a Pronoun, a substantivized adjective:

Cerdic (Hē) sæde his hlāforde Cerdic (He) said to his lord.

The Predicate

The predicate is a word or a group of words that inform us of what happening to the person, object or phenomenon indicated as the subject in the sentence. Predicate is the means of expressing predication and modality for the whole sentence, it relates the information contained in the sentence to the reality. The predicate in OE may be either verbal or nominal, simple and compound.

The simple verbal predicate is expressed by the finite form of the notional verb: þā cwæþ hē then he said.

A compound verbal predicate consists of a finite form and a verbal: Ne can ic noht singan I cannot sing anything. The first component expresses the speaker’s attitude and the meaning of the verbal determines the meaning of the whole unit. As the first component of a compound verbal predicate we find preterite-present verbs.

A nominal predicate is always compound in OE: hē wæs swyþe spēdig man he was a very rich man. It consists of a link-verb and a predicative (a nominal part) expressed by a noun or an adjective.