ABSTRACT
The present study is an attempt to show that the foundations of a contextual grammar of English must be firmly based on an adequate definition of the sentence. Fries resolves the purely grammatical problem by using the term utterance unit for ‘those chunks of talk that are marked off by a shift of speaker’. In redescribing the various kinds of subordination, it will be noted that there are two extremes in the amount of description. Subordination is divided into six groups: the relative clause, the two kinds of noun clause, the adverbial clause, problems of non-finite clauses which do not have subordinating conjunctions, apposition, and interpolation as controversial super-adjunct for the clause. Having described the roles of subordinate clause, independent clause and clauses other than subordinate, the people consider the assumptions about context which are based upon the foregoing description of clause in order to lay the final foundations for the definition of sentence.
