ABSTRACT
John Lyons defines the sentence as the maximum unit of grammatical analysis: ‘A grammatical unit between the constituent parts of which distributional limitations and dependencies can be established, but which can itself be put into no distribution class’. In other words, formal statements can be made about the distribution of sentence constituents, but not about sentences as wholes. Lyons’s definition implies that the sentence has a certain sort of unity; it is grammatically complete; it can stand on its own, independent of context; and it has a degree of semantic independence. Complex sentences are those sentences that can be analysed as consisting of a number of simple sentences. The distribution of the subordinate constructions can be accounted for in terms of the distribution of the sentence constituent into which they are embedded. Subordinate sentences may be important for the strict sub-categorization of various lexemes.
