ABSTRACT
Unit of speech constructed according to language-dependent rules, which is relatively complete and independent in respect to content, grammatical structure, and intonation. During the history of linguistics, the vagueness of syntactic and semantic features which define sentences has led to repeated attempts at definitions, of which the following two more recent attempts will be highlighted. According to formal aspects, American structuralism (see Bloomfield 1933) provides a strict definition of ‘sentence’ as the largest independent syntactic form which cannot be embedded in any other syntactic form by any grammatical rule. Described syntactically, the sentence is the result of an analysis that proceeds from the smallest units (phonemes) through morphemes, words, and phrases to the synthesis ‘sentence.’ In transformational grammar, a sentence (abbreviated S) is the fundamental basis of syntactic analysis, where S is defined extensionally by giving the rules that, when applied, will result in the production of sentences. In both of these definitions, a sentence is seen as a unit of langue ( langue vs parole), in distinction to sentence as a parole-based concrete utterance, where it becomes especially problematic to identify a sentence, particularly in spoken discourse. Sentences can be classified according to the following aspects. (a) Formally, the position of the verb can be important: in English, verbinitial p osition is a marker for interrogatives or imperatives. (b) In reference to communicative-pragmatic functions, word order, mood, and intonation can be used to indicate four basic types of sentences: statements, interrogatives, imperatives and conditionals (if only…). (c) Based on varying degrees of complexity of the syntactic structure, sentences can be divided into simple, compound, and complex sentences: simple sentences may contain only one finite verb plus obligatory and optional ( obligatory vs optional) constituents; compound sentences contain at least two finite verbs, with clauses being joined through coordination; complex sentences contain at least two finite verbs, with all additional (dependent) clauses being joined to the main (=independent) clause via subordination.
