SEMINAR 7

1. Sentence – proposition – utterance – speech act correlation

The sentence is the main object of syntax[ as part of Grammar. The sentence have 2 features: are predicativity and communicative nature of immediately lower level of the language hierarchy.

1) predicativity is the relation between the situation named by the sentence and extralinguistic reality.

2) communicative nature any sentence serves as one unit of communication – the minimal communicative unit.

The sentence composed of words arranged according to a definite syntactic pattern.

More than 300 definitions of the sentence. The description based on 2 aspect of ling. analysis:

1) Internal – deals with structural and semantic features of the sentence: they are studied by Structural syntax;

2) External – deals with functional characteristics of the sentence in speech communication: they are studied by Actual syntax.

There are 5 characteristics invariable present in any description of the sentence:

1) The sentence is a structural unit, it s location is on the syntactic level of language;

2) is a bilateral unit (has 2 planes – of content (meaning) and expression (form);

3) is a constructional unit: it is predicative construction are always related with one another by predicative relation;

4) is a communicative unit – it serves as one communicative unit of language.

5) is a language unit (an “eme”-unit) and it has its speech counterpart (“allo”-unit) – the utterance.

The sentence is an independent unit of finite predication that possesses the communicative force and thus functions as an independent unit of information.

2. The simple sentence and its types

The classification of the sentence, by tradition, is based on the structural criterion and denotes of 3 types: simple, compound and complex sentence. But this classification is not consistent, because the simple sentence is singled out on the basic of its structural composition, while the compound and complex sentences – of the types of SR established between the clauses.

This classification has compiled by B.A.Ilyish the sentence divided into simple and composite, and composite divided into compound and complex.

THE SIMPLE SENTENCE – is a sentence, which has one relation of primary predication, or one predicative line (established between the Subject + Predicate).

According to the type, simple sentence can be two types:

1. One-member – contains either the subject or the predicate. This class divided into two possible kinds with explicitly expressed component:

• The nominative (nominal): Summer.

• The verbal (imperative) sentence: Go away. Singing.

2. Two-member – is sentence, which formed by both the subject and predicate. This sentens is divided into parts called “the parts of the sentence”.

3. Parts of the sentence. Criteria of establishing parts of the sentence.

Traditional classification has two types of parts of the sentence:

1. the main parts – they are the S and P;

2. the secondary parts – they are all another parts of sentence, except the S and P.

But it appropriate for synthetic languages whose words have inflection.

L. S. Barkhudarov and G. G. Pocheptsov have developed classification for synthetic and analytical languages. According at first, there are only S and P – they immediate constituents of sentence, other words make up the group of it. The classification by Pocheptsov are more complete and we have 4 types of part of the sentence:

• the basic parts – S and P

• the main parts – are obligatory complements of the verb

• the secondary parts – either optional complements of the verb or nominal elements

• the detached parts – parenthetic elements of the sentence.

For example: I think, Kate wrote letter yesterday (d-b-m-s)