25Simple Sentence (ss)

1.1 Definition. A sentence is a unit of speech whose grammatical structure conforms to the laws of the language and which serves as the chief means of conveying a thought. A sentence is not only a means of communicating something about reality but a means of showing the speaker’s attitude to it.

1.2 Classification. The classification of SS is based on two principles:

1. according to the purpose of the utterance;

2. according to the structure.

According to the purpose of the utterance we distinguish 4 kinds of sentences:

The declarative sentence states a fact in the affirmative or negative form. In DS the subject precedes the predicate (pronounced with falling intonation) (!: English predicate can have only one negation).

He does not go anywhere.

The interrogative sentence asks a question. It is formed by means of inversion (unless subject is an interrogative word: Who is in the room? – no inversion).

There are 4 kinds of questions:

1. General questions requiring the answer yes or no and spoken with a rising intonation. They are formed by placing part of the predicative (auxiliary or modal verb) before the subject.

Do you like art? Can you speak English?

Astonishment: Haven’t you seen him yet?

Rhetoric questions: Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons?

Special q. beginning with an interrogative word (falling intonation)

Where do you live? (order of words is as in Gen. question)

Who lives in this room? (Who – is a subject, order of words is as that of a statement)

2. Alternative questions, indicating choice (1. rising intonation 2. falling):

Do you live in town or in the country?

(d) Disjunctive questions requiring the answer yes or no and consisting of an affirmative statement followed by a negative question, or a negative statement followed by an affirmative question (1. Falling 2. Rising intonation)

You speak English, don’t you?

An Imperative sentence serves to induce a person to do smth, so it expresses a command (falling tone: Come to the blackboard!), a request or invitation (rising tone: Open the door, please!).

An exclamatory sentence expresses some kind of emotion or feeling. It often begins with the words what and how, it is always in the declarative form (no inversion) (falling intonation: What a lovely day it is! How wonderful!)

According to their structure SS are divided into two-member and one-member sentences. A two-member sentence is complete when it has a subject and a predicate.

Fleur had easily established immediate contact with an architect.

A two-member sentence is incomplete when one of the principal parts or both of them are missing, but can be easily understood from the context. Such sentences are called elliptical: What were we doing? –Drinking.

A one-member sentence has only one member, which is neither subject nor predicate. This does not mean that the other member is missing, for the one member makes the sense complete. Used in descriptions and in emotional speech.

If the main part of a one member sentence is expressed by a noun, the sentence is called nominal. The noun may be modified by attributes.

Dusk – of the summer night.

The main part of a one member sentence is often expressed by an infinitive.

To die out there – lonely, waiting them, waiting home.

SS can be unextended (consisting only of the primary or principal parts) and extended (consisting of the subject, a predicate and one or more secondary parts: objects, attributes or adverbial modifiers). 1) Birds fly. 2) This big girl is a student. (attr)

26The subject. Means of expressing the subject.

The subject is the independent member of a two-member predication, containing the person component of predicativity. The subject is generally defined as a word or a group of words denoting the thing we speak about. The subject of a simple sentence can be a word, a syntactical word-morpheme or a complex. As a word it can belong to different parts of speech, but it is mostly a noun or a pronoun. A word used as a subject combines the lexical meaning with the structural meaning of “person”. So it is at the same time the structural and the notional subject. We may speak of a secondary subject within a complex. The syntactical word-morphemes there and it may also function as secondary subjects (It being cold, we put on our coats. I knew of there being no one to help them). The analysis of sentences like He was seen to enter the house, is a point at issue. Traditionally the infinitive is said to form part of the complex subject (He…to enter). Ilyish maintains that though satisfactory from the logical point of view, this interpretation seems to be artificial grammatically, this splitting of the subject being alien to English. He suggests that only HE should be treated as a subject, whereas was sees to enter represents a peculiar type of compound predicate. Some grammarians (Smirnitsky, Ganshina) speak of definite-personal, indefinite-personal, impersonal sentences, but it is a semantical classification of subjects, not sentences. If we compare the subject in English with that of Russian we shall find a considerable difference between them. In Russian the subject is characterized by a distinct morphological feature – the nominative case, in English it is indicated by the position it occupies in the sentence. In Russian the subject is much less obligatory as a part of the sentence than in English. In English the subject may be a syntactical word-morpheme, a gerund, or a complex, which is alien to Russian.

27The Object is a secondary part of the sentence expressed by a verb, a noun, a substantival pronoun, an adjective, a numeral, or an adverb, and denoting a thing to which the action passes on, which is a result of the action, in reference to which an action is committed or a property is manifested, or denoting an action as object of another action.

Classification of object:

1.Prepositional and non-prepositional objects

2.Morphological types (noun, pronoun, substantivized adjective, infinitive, gerund)

3.Direct/indirect, is applied only to objects expressed by nouns or pronouns. There are sentences in which the predicate is expressed by the verbs send, show, lend, give. These verbs usually take 2 different kinds of objects simultaneously: (1) an object expressing the thing which is sent, shown, lent, given, etc. (2) the person or persons to whom the thing is sent, shown, lent, given, etc.

The difference between the 2 relations is clear enough: the direct object denotes the thing immediately affected by the action denoted by the predicate verb, whereas the indirect object expresses the person towards whom the thing is moved, e.g. We sent them a present. The indirect object stands 1st, the direct object comes after it. In studying different kinds of objects it is also essential to take into account the possibility of the corresponding passive construction.

Object :

I.Notional:

1.Direct :

Patient ( to bring the chour

Located (to climb a tree)

Effected (to write an composition)

Cognate to live, alive

Interrogative (what nonsence)

Negative (I don’t know)

Retained ( passive)

Emphatic ( what a…)

Complex ( I saw him go)

2. indirect

a.non-recepient:

patient

interrogative

negative ( I know nothing)

retained

complex

agent (passive)

instrumental ( I wrote with a jaw)

b.recepient:

non-prepositional

prepositional

II. Formal

Introductory dummy ( let’s walk it)

28The Attribute

Attribute is a dependent element of a nominative phrase that denotes an

attributive quality of an object expressed by a noun. It is a secondary part of the

sentence modifying a part of the sentence expressed by a noun, a substantival

pronoun, a cardinal numeral, and any substantivised word, and characterizing the

thing named by these words as to its quality or property.

According to the position relative to the head word, attributes can be

prepositive and postpositive. The position of an attribute with respect to its head

word depends partly on the morphological peculiarities of the attribute itself, and

partly on stylistic factors.

Apposition has been often regarded as a special kind of attribute, and

sometimes as a secondary part of a sentence distinct from an attribute. Apposition

is a word or phrase referring to a part of the sentence expressed by a noun, and

explaining and specifying its meaning by giving it another name. Appositions are

usually expressed by nouns.

. The Attribute

The A. is a secondary part of the sentence which constitutes part of a noun phrase, modifies its head and denotes a quality of a person or a thing. It may be represented by a single word, a phrase, or a subordinate clause; it may precede or follow the word it modifies.

Parts of speech: an adjective, a pronoun (my, these), a numeral, a noun, a participle – a sleeping baby, a gerund – sleeping tablets, an infinitive – a book for you to read, an adverb – the room above, prepositional phrases – jokes of your brother’s. Attributive clauses used as postmodifiers transform the whole sentence into a complex one: I’ll never forget the day when we first met.

29. One-member and elliptical sentences.

The subject-group and the predicate-group of the sentence are its two constitutive "members", or, to choose a somewhat more specific term, its "axes" (in the Russian grammatical tradition - составы пред­ложения). According as both members are present in the composition of the sentence or only one of them, sentences are classed into "two-member" and "one-member" ones.

Scholars point out that "genuine" one-member sentences are char­acterized not only as expressing one member in their outer structure; in addition, as an essential feature, they do not imply the other member on the contextual lines. In other words, in accord with this view, elliptical sentences in which the subject or the predicate is contextually omitted, are analysed as "two-member" sentences.

For instance, the sentence ''Come оп!” exemplifying one of the clas­sical one-member sentence varieties, implies a situational person (per­sons) stimulated to perform an action, i.e. the subject of the event. Similarly, the construction "All right!” rendering agreement on the part of the speaker, is a representative unit standing for a normal two-member utterance in its contextual-bound implication plane, otherwise it would be senseless.

All simple sentences of English should be divided into two-axis con­structions and one-axis constructions.

In a two-axis sentence, the subject axis and the predicate axis are directly and explicitly expressed in the outer structure. This concerns all the three cardinal communicative types of sentences. E.g.: The books come out of the experiences. What has been happening here? You better go back to bed.

In a one-axis sentence only one axis or its part is explicitly expressed, the other one being non-presented in the outer structure of the sen­tence.

The response utterance is a one-axis sentence with the predicate-axis expressed (partially, by its predicative unit) and the subject-axis (together with the link-verb of the predicate) implied.

"I thought he might have said something to you about it." - "Not a word."

The response utterance is a one-axis sentence with the predicate-axis partially expressed (by the object) and the subject-axis together with the verbal part of the predicate-axis implied.

"Glad to see you after all these years!"

The sentence is a one-axis unit with the predicate-axis expressed and the subject-axis implied as a form of familiarity.

All the cited examples belong to "elliptical" types of utterances in so far as they possess quite definite "vacant" positions or zero-positions capable of being supplied with the corresponding fillers implicit in the situational contexts. Since the restoration of the absent axis in such sen­tences is, so to speak, "free of avail", we class them as "free" one-axis sentences. The term "elliptical" one-axis sentences can also be used, though it is not very lucky here; indeed, "ellipsis" as a sentence-curtail­ing process can in principle affect both two-axis and one-axis sentences, so the term might be misleading.

Alongside the demonstrated free one-axis sentences, i.e. sentences with a direct contextual axis-implication, there are one-axis sentences without a contextual implication of this kind; in other words, their absent axis can­not be restored with the same ease and, above all, semantic accuracy.

One-axis sentences form minor set within the general system of English sentence patterns, they all are related to two-axis sentences either by direct of by indirect association.

30The predicate as the main means of expressing predication. Types of predicates.

The Predicate is the part of the sentence which expresses a predicative feature attributed to the subject of the sentence. Like the subject, the predicate also carries out a triple function in the sentence: structural, semantic and communicative. Its structural function consists in establishing the syntactic relations with the subject and other parts of the sentence. The semantic function of the predicate finds its expression in attributing certain features to the subject. Its communicative function is manifested in the fact that through the predicate and the expression of predication the sentence becomes a minimal unit of communication. The predicate is 'the structural and semantic centre of the sentence’. In the structure of a simple, two-member sentence the predicate usually carries out the function of the rheme, He disappeared. According to the form of expression predicates are divided into verbal and nominal: The moon rose. The moon was pale. There exists a phraseological predicate (presents a combination of such verbs as have, get, give, take and a verbal noun (give a look, take a bath, have a smoke). From the grammatical point of view the most important characteristic of this type of predicate is not so much its phraseological but its analytical character (all analytical structures are characterized by idiomaticity of their components). The verb expresses the grammatical meaning and the verbal noun expresses a lexical meaning. The two formal types of the predicate correspond to the two main semantic types: process predicate which expresses the action, the state or the existence of the subject and qualification predicate which expresses the quality (property) of the subject. The process predicate can be further subdivided into several types in accordance with the semantic types of verbs: existential (There was a tavern in the town), statal (He slept), locative (The elephant lives in India), relational (He had a small ranch) and actional (The car broke down). The qualification predicate has three subtypes: identifying (So you are the man we have been looking for), classifying (My friend is a student) and characterizing (My wife is a bit of an actress. He was too German).Structurally the predicate may be divided into simple and compound. We said good- bye - a simple verbal predicate; It was a lovely place -simple nominal predicate. The predicate is compounded by the introduction of modal or aspective components. We started saying good-bye - a compound verbal predicate; It must be a lovely place - a compound nominal predicate.

31/ The phrase

We will term "phrase" every combination of two or more words which is a grammatical unit but is not an analytical form of some word (as, for instance, the perfect forms of verbs).

Classification of phrases according to their distribution:

Paratactic phrases

(free relations between elements) e.g. Yes, please.

e.g. We, the people,…

Hypotactic phrases(interdependence of elements)

endocentric- subordinative e.g. fresh milk, coordinative e.g. some pens and pencils

exocentric – predicative e.g. for him to do, prepositional e.g. at sunrise

according to the type of connection: subordinative, coordinative and predicative phrases (subordination, coordination, predicative relation)

Subordination:

1) agreement (concord) – e.g. this book – these books; Flying planes can be dangerous (Flying planes is/are dangerous);

2) government – e.g. seeing her, Peter’s book;

3) adjoinment – e.g. reading fast;

4) enclosure – e.g. giving her a present, a nice dress.

a). According to the type of the head word, nucleus: noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, pronominal and adjectival phrases.

b). According to the syntactic function of the adjunct: attributive (cold weather), object (writing letters), adverbial phrases (very interesting).

c). According to the position of the adjunct: with prepositive adjunct (cold weather), with postpositive adjunct (money to spend), with mitpositive adjunct (did not know), frame structures (as good as).

Coordinative phrases:

- according to presence or absence of connectors (syndetic and asyndetic);

- according to the type of conjunctions (with copulative connection pens and pencils; with disjunctive connection just but strict; with adversative connection now or never)

according to the number of constituents: binary (cold weather) and multiple (a girl with blue eyes)

33/Syntactical Relations between the Components of Phrase

They may be divided into 3 groups: 1) agreement; 2) government; 3) adjoinment. Agreement is a means of syntactical relationship between words which implies that the use of one form necessitates the use of the other.

1) an adjunct word agrees in number with its headword (a noun) E.g. this (that) book – these (those) books.

2) a singular subject requires a predicate in the singular, a plural subject requires the predicate in the plural. E.g. I am a student. There are 2 books on the table. But in Modern English there is sometimes a conflict between form and meaning, in these cases the predicate doesn’t agree with the subject. My family are early risers. My family is small.

Government is a means of connecting words consisting in the use of a certain case form of the adjunct required by its headword.

1) The use of the objective case of personal pronouns and of the pronoun ‘who’ when they are subordinate to a verb or follow a preposition: e.g. I saw him (her, them). Whom did u see there?

2) We also find government between the headnoun and the attributive adjunct noun. E.g. The boy’s mother; the student’s answer.

Adjoinment is such a way of connecting words when they are joined to one another without any specail forms by only their position and combinability. It is found in the following cases:

1) Adverbs are joined to the verb. E.g. they walked slowly.

2) Adjectives, participles, pronouns (when used as attributes) are joined to their head-nouns. E.g. a small room.

3) Adverbs are joined to adjectives or other adverbs: very interesting, very well.

34. English word order is strict and rather inflexible. As there are few endings in English that show person, number, case, and tense, English relies on word order to show relationships between words in asentence.

English nouns do not have any case endings (only personal pronouns have some case endings), so it is mostly the word order that tells you where things are in a sentence, and how they interact. Compare:The dog sees the cat. The cat sees the dog.The main pattern of basic word order in English declarative sentences is SUBJECT + PREDICATE + OBJECT, often called SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT. Example: Tom writes stories. It means that if these three parts of the sentence are present in a statement (a declarative sentence), the subject is placed before the predicate, the predicate follows the subject, and the object is placed after the predicate. Adverbial modifiers are placed after the object, and adjectives are placed before their nouns.

General questionsAuxiliary verb + subject + main verb (+ object + adverbial modifier):Do you smoke? Does he speak English?

Special questionsQuestion word + auxiliary verb + subject + main verb (+ object + adverbial modifier):Where does he live? What are you writing now?

Alternative questionsAlternative questions have the same word order as general questions.Does he live in Paris or Rome? Are you writing a report or a letter?

Tag questionsTag questions consist of two parts. The first part has the same word order as statements, and the second part is a short general question (the tag).He lives here, doesn't he?They haven't seen this film, have they?