- •The Subject Matter of Grammar
- •The Evolution of English Grammars
- •The XX th Century Linguistic Schools
- •Prague Linguistic School (Functional Linguistics)
- •American Descriptive Linguistics
- •Transformational and Transformational Generative Grammar
- •Semantic Syntax
- •Methods of Linguistic Analysis
- •Parsing (Traditional Syntactic Analysis)
- •The Oppositional Method
- •The Distributional method
- •The ic Method (method of immediate constituents)
- •The Transformational Method
- •The Method of Deep and Surface Structures
- •The Functional Sentence Perspective Method (fsp)
- •The Componential Method
- •The Contextual Method
- •The Levels of Language
- •The Morphological Structure of me
- •The Classifications of Morphemes
- •Paradigmatics and Syntagmatics
- •The Asymmetry of a Linguistic Sign
- •Parts of Speech Classifications of Parts of Speech.
- •Notionals and Functionals
- •Heterogeneity
- •Field and Periphery
- •Subcategorization
- •Onomaseological approach
- •The Noun The General Properties of a Noun
- •The Category of Gender.
- •The Category of Number
- •The Category of Case
- •Debated Problems within the Category of Case
- •Genitive Constructions (n’s n)
- •The Article Debated Problems
- •The Functions of Articles in a Sentence
- •The Verb The General Properties of a Verb
- •The Category of Tense
- •Classifications of Tenses
- •The Future Tense
- •The Present Tense
- •The Past Tense
- •The Future-in-the-Past Tense
- •The Category of Aspect
- •The Category of Time Relation (or Correlation)
- •The Category of Voice
- •The Category of Mood
- •The Indicative Mood
- •The Imperative Mood
- •The Subjunctive Mood
- •Points of Similarities with the Finites
- •Points of Differences with the Finites
- •Debated Problems within The Verbals
- •The Functions of Non-Finites
- •Types of Syntax
- •The theory of the phrase
- •Devices of Connecting Words in a Phrase
- •Debated Problems within the Theory of the Phrase
- •Classifications of Phrases
- •The theory of the simple sentence
- •The Definition of a Sentence
- •Syntactic Modelling of the Sentence
- •Semantic Modelling of the Sentence
- •The Notion of a Syntactic Paradigm
- •Structural Classification of Simple Sentences
- •Predicative Constructions Within a simple sentence we distinguish primary and secondary (independent/ dependent) elements, the structural nucleus and its adjuncts.
- •Syntactic Processes
- •The Principal Parts of a Simple Sentence
- •The Secondary Parts of a Simple Sentence
- •An Object
- •An Adverbial Modifier
- •An Attribute
- •Debated Problems within a Simple Sentence
- •A composite sentence
- •A Compound Sentence
- •I. The General Notion of a Complex Sentence.
- •2. The Status of the Subordinate Clause.
- •3.1. Classifications of Subordinate Clauses.
- •3.2. Types of Subordinate Clauses.
- •4. Connections between the Principal and the Subordinate Clause.
- •5. Neutralization between Subordination and Coordination.
- •6. The Character of the Subordinating Conjunction
- •7. Levels of Subordination
- •Syntactic Processes in the Complex Sentence.
- •9. Communicative Dynamism within a Composite Sentence( Compound and Complex) and a Supra-phrasal Unit.
The theory of the simple sentence
Sentential syntax is to be understood as a language component of our internal grammar, which allows us to generate, process and recognize grammatically correct sentences out of a limited storage of words without a moment’s hesitation. It’s a study of our computer-like ability in transformational-generative terms to generate, process and recognize acceptable or non-acceptable structures of the type The field is frozen. The leaves are dry. Life consists of propositions about life. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. There’s no sense in the last sentence, but we still recognize it as an English sentence, though lexico-semantical valency laws are destroyed. It’s recognizable as a poetic metaphor , the product of the XX century experimental verse. Sentential syntax is a study of syntactical modelling, communicative dynamism (the functional sentence perspective) of all kinds of sentences – simple and composite(compound and complex).
Though new revolutionary methods of parsing (грамматический разбор) have swept into prominence in the second half of the XX th century and shaken the foundations of Traditional grammar, traditional parsing into the main and secondary parts has not gone into oblivion; the subject and the predicate come back into view.
The present day sentential syntax takes advantage of basic achievements of traditionalists, structuralists, transformationalists, generativists, that is all sophistication of the modern syntactic research, innovatory techniques and procedures of analysis.
The Definition of a Sentence
We are to distinguish among sentences, clauses and utterances. A sentence is a grammatical unit of written language. An utterance is a speech act, a pragmatic unit. A clause is a constituent of a sentence, a higher-ranked unit- a sentence- contains lower- ranked units – clauses.
All attempts at presenting a definition that would satisfy all scholars have proved to be fruitless. Scholars have failed to achieve a generally acceptable definition. There exist hundreds of definitions, but none of them is found adequate. A sentence is a polyfunctional unit. It possesses many aspects (facets): grammatical structure, a certain distribution of communicative dynamism, modality, predicativity, intonation, etc. There are absolutely differing types of sentences. There are one-word sentences (Help! Fire! Women! Magnificent! Eighty-five!). There are 50 page-long sentences. Such is Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated monologue from J. Joyce’s “Ulysses”. It is impossible to arrive at one uniform definition which could cover multiple types of sentences and embrace all facets of a sentence.
There exist logical, psychological, structural, phonetical, graphical definitions of a sentence. A sentence is an expression of a complete thought or judgement (logical). A sentence is an utterance which makes as long a communication as the speaker has intended to make before giving himself a rest (phonetical).
According to S. Porter, a sentence is a minimum complete utterance, a structure, it’s analysed into morphemes, words, phrases, clauses. It is a segment of speech flowing between pause and pause; it is a binary unit. According to prof. Khaimovich, a sentence is a communicative unit made up of words and word-morphemes in accordance with their combinability and structurally united by intonation and predicativity. M.Y. Bloch in his definition attempts to cover all aspects of a sentence ( structure, nominative quality, intonation, predicativity, modality, pragmaticity, communicative dynamism): a sentence is a unit of speech, built of words; unlike a word, a sentence doesn’t exist in the system of a language as a ready-made unit, it’s created by the speaker in the course of communication; it’s intonationally coloured, characterized by predicativity, possesses a nominative aspect, has a contextually relevant communicative purpose.
Before classifying sentences we shall dwell upon syntactic modelling, semantic modelling and a syntactic paradigm of the sentence.