ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a diagram that gives a simple concept of how sentences contribute to the building of the meaning of a paragraph, imagining for the moment that a sentence has an unambiguous and precise meaning. People commonly think that sentences have fixed meanings, and simple sentences do seem to. Most sentences, however, do not stand alone but function as part of a longer unit of discourse, the paragraph. Languages commonly have special markers that guide and limit the addressee in integrating the meaning of a sentence with its context. A major Russian linguist calculates that there are some 217,000 different ways of paraphrasing an ordinary sentence of English due to lexical substitution alone. Transformational grammars can provide something close to the structural meaning(s) of a sentence by identifying and removing all the superficial irregularities and rearrangements that English grammar and style require.