ABSTRACT
We have talked a great deal about sentences being made up of constituents. But we have hardly talked about the sentence itself, and what we mean by this. In everyday language, the term ‘sentence’ is often taken to refer to an utterance, or to something that conveys a whole idea. These rather loose notions hint at the phonological unity and semantic unity that characterize sentences (see Links to other levels). But in linguistics, the term ‘sentence’ is defined very precisely in syntactic terms.
