ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the different structures that sentences can have and how they correspond to different meanings. There are four main types of sentences which can be distinguished structurally for English. They are: declaratives, imperatives, interrogatives, and exclamatives. The chapter distinguishes four different uses of sentences, often referred to as meaning type or illocutionary force. Of course people can make much finer-grained divisions of the ways in which they use sentences, but these are the ones that are standardly assumed: statement, question, directive, and exclamation. Declaratives are usually used to make a statement, interrogatives normally pose questions, imperatives issue directives and exclamatives make exclamations. However, this is just the typical correspondence between form and function; in fact, interrogatives can be used for purposes other than posing a question and questions can be asked without using an interrogative structure.
