14. The sentence

1. The sentence: the problem of its definition.

2. The sentence. Its major categories:

   • Predicativity and predication.

   • Modality.

3. Typology of the sentence.

1. The sentence: the problem of its definition

The sentence, along with the word, is probably the most familiar of all grammatical terms introduced early in school. This leads to an impression that the definition of the sentence is self-evident. The opposite turns out to be the case. The number of definitions of the sentence amounts to 1000 but none of them is generally accepted. There are different approaches to the definition of the sentence: some of them sound simple; others try to account for all the complexity of the phenomenon.

(1) The old definition of the sentence states that it is “a complete expression of a single thought”. But this notional approach is too vague to be of much help. There are many sentences expressing a single thought but which do not seem complete:

E.g.: Lovely day! Taxi! Nice one! Tennis?

There are also sentences which are complete but express more than one thought:

E.g.: For his birthday, Ben wants a bike and a visit to the theme park.

Thus the notional definition fails because it is completely subjective. There is no objective standard by which completeness of a thought can be measured.

(2) A sentence is defined as a group of words that contains an unsubordinated subject and predicate. But this definition rules out all one-member sentences.

(3) A sentence may be interpreted as something which begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop. Then some questions arise:

• What do we do with question and exclamation marks?

• People disagree about punctuation.

• Punctuation is often not used even in writing.

(4) Linguists noticed that a sentence is not a mere group of words or other units. It is something integral: it’s a unity of formal nature. Thus a sentence is a structural unit built in accordance with one of the patterns existing in a given language. Though the formal approach to English grammar tries to avoid all the difficulties by describing the way sentences are constructed, speech proves that everything is more complicated than that: (1) an oral sentence differs greatly from a written sentence, and (2) structural patterns are applicable to simple sentences (transformational and generative grammar is limited to generating only simple sentences. The list of kernel sentences developed by Z. Harris comprises only simple sentences and cannot be extended over the domain of composite sentences). Besides, the structural definition overlooks the meaningful side of a sentence.

The list of definitions is by no means complete. To sum it up, there are several distinguishable, and more or less well-known, approaches which seek to provide an answer to the question What is the sentence?:

1. logical;

2. psychological;

3. phonetic;

4. graphic;

5. grammatical.

Logical definitions do not make the distinction between a sentence and a judgment. But forms of thinking cannot be matched one-to-one with forms of language. There is a whole range of possibilities how forms of thinking can be expressed in linguistic forms. Within the psychological approach the sentence was understood as some form of reflection emerging in a person’s head. But in this case the sentence does not have any linguistic characteristics and becomes a peculiar property of an individual psychic activity. The phonetic definition makes the sentence dependent on the intonation contour as the sentence is understood as a stretch of speech between two pauses. Consequently, sentences should only exist in oral speech. Then, pauses can be made both within a simple and a composite sentence and can never be a reliable criterion of the boundaries of a sentence. The defects of the graphic definition have already been discussed above. Grammatical definitions take into account the grammatical properties of the sentence and aim at defining this notion with maximum precision. But here again there is a wide range of possibilities depending on the linguistic theory and related principles.

To arrive at the comprehensive definition of the sentence, its specific parameters should be determined and properly described. As a linguistic entity, the sentence has its structural, meaningful, and communicative sides. These sides are realized in four dimensions: (1) syntactic structure or formal structure, (2) syntactic semantics, (3) communicative value, and (4) nominative or denotational aspect of the sentence⁶⁶.

The sentence is a structural or formal unit. A structure in linguistics implies an arrangement of elements tied to each other in a fixed way⁶⁷. It is built according to existing structural patterns as each language has its own systems of structural groupings. They are referred to as syntactic paradigms, structural types of the sentence. There is a long history of establishing these structural types and patterns in linguistics, as it has always been a challenge for grammarians to fit all the multitude of language structures into a concise classification. As is known, structuralists used IC analysis and singled out immediate constituents in the sentence, dividing the sentence into two parts: the VP (verb phrase) and the NP (noun phrase). Though their theory is quite precise, its sphere of application is restricted to simple sentences, leaving out the composite sentence. Transformational grammar focused on establishing kernel sentences (basic structures) and a set of transformation rules to derive all the infinitude of existing sentences. The goal of this type of grammar was to explain the generation of sentences. Within this approach Z. Harris established seven types of kernel sentences in English. But again these types cover only the simple sentence. Traditional grammar is concentrated on the description of existing structural types of the sentence. The structure underlying the sentence can be classified according to different bases: one-member ÷ two-member, free ÷ bound, extended ÷ unextended, simple ÷ composite, syndetic ÷ asyndetic.

The structure underlying the sentence has a semantic value as well⁶⁸. Structural semantics presupposes the description of the sentence in terms of Case Grammar (Ch. Fillmore) or the theory of semantic roles. Case Grammar “came into being in an atmosphere in which the search for a more “semantically” defined underlying structure was at the top of the linguistic agenda” [Construction Grammars 2005: 2].

According to Ch. Fillmore, in the framework of Case Grammar, the term case identifies ‘the underlying syntactic-semantic relationship’. The case categories, which Ch. Fillmore singles out, are taken from a universal list of meaningful relationships in which items stand to each other in a sentence: Agentive (John opened the door; The door was opened by John), Instrumental (The key opened the door; John opened the door with the key; John used the key to open the door), Dative (John believed that he could win; We persuaded John that he would win; It was apparent to John that he would win), Factitive (The man makes a wurly), Locative (Chicago is windy; It is windy in Chicago)⁶⁹. To this list he adds Benefactive and Comitative (He and his wife are coming; He is coming with his wife). The list of cases is accompanied with lists of roles: AGENT, EXPERIENCER, INSTRUMENT, OBJECT, SOURCE, GOAL, LOCATION, TIME. The linguist also studies case frames, i.e. “the case environment the sentence provides”⁷⁰. This approach, despite its drawbacks and limitations, relates semantic cases or thematic roles to syntactic description and reveals semantic divergence of seemingly similar syntactic structures (cf.: The door opened. ÷ John opened the door.) and the relationship of semantic similarity of seemingly different syntactic structures (cf. the examples above).

G.G. Pocheptsov uses the term semantic role as it gives a better account of the changing, variable characteristics of the semantic content of the nominal group. Semantic units, which correspond to the participants of the situation, are called semantic roles [Иванова, Бурлакова, Почепцов 1981: 241]. The sentence structure may contain the semantic roles of agens, patiens, benefactive, nominative, factitive, instrument, locative, etc. The semantic configuration of the sentence is a set of semantic roles necessary for the semantic markedness of the sentence, plus the meaning of the action [Иванова, Бурлакова, Почепцов 1981: 242]. Thus the sentence is structured with reference to these semantic positions. Nevertheless sometimes semantic roles may be minimized due to lexical semantics. In this case the verb includes some semantic role in its semantic structure (e.g., to gild conveys the idea of the action ‘to cover’ and that of the material ‘gold’). Thus the role structure of the verb to gild contains two semantic roles, that of agens and that of patiens (They gilded the spire) [Иванова, Бурлакова, Почепцов 1981: 248-249].

P. Kroeger sums up different approaches to the way semantic roles are labeled by different grammarians (as he puts it, “unfortunately but not surprisingly”) and comes up with a final list he makes use of:

AGENT: causer or initiator of events;

EXPERIENCER: animate entity which perceives a stimulus or registers a particular mental or emotional process or state;

RECIPIENT: animate entity which receives or acquires something;

BENEFICIARY: entity (usually animate) for whose benefit an action is performed;

INSTRUMENT: inanimate entity used by an agent to perform some action

THEME: entity which undergoes a change of location or possession, or whose location is being specified;

PATIENT: entity which is acted upon, affected, or created; or of which a state or change of state is predicated;

STIMULUS: object of perception, cognition, or emotion; entity which is seen, known, remembered, loved, hated, etc. ;

LOCATION: spatial reference point of the event (the SOURCE, GOAL, and PATH roles are often considered to be sub-types of LOCATION);

SOURCE: the origin or beginning point of a motion;

GOAL: the destination or end-point of a motion;

PATH: the trajectory or pathway of a motion;

ACCOMPANIMENT (or COMITATIVE): entity which accompanies or is associated with the performance of an action [Kroeger 2006: 54-55].

The examples⁷¹ below show how the system works:

A) John	gave	Mary	a bouquet
AGENT		RECIPIENT	THEME
B) John	baked	Mary	a cake
AGENT		BENEFICIARY	PATIENT
C) John	opened	the lock	with a key
AGENT		PATIENT	INSTRUMENT
D)Sherlock Holmes	heard	a piercing scream
EXPERIENCER		STIMULUS

From the point of view of its communicative value, the sentence can be analyzed from different standpoints: the purpose of the utterance (whether the speaker wants to declare something, ask a question, or give a command), the communicative task (express a surprise, protest, etc.), and actual division of the sentence.

Actual division of the sentence is based on the idea that the message conveyed by the sentence in English is constructed in terms of theme and rheme. Theme in English is put first and is defined as “the element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is that with which the clause⁷² is concerned”⁷³. The rest is the rheme of the message, which is indicative of some new information.

And, finally, the sentence denotes something (the nominative or denotational aspect) as it refers to some situation and names it, thus fulfilling its nominative function. Thus the sentence has its own meaning which is deducible from the lexical meanings of its parts. Sentences unlike words and word-combinations denote an actualized situation, i.e. a situation related to reality. It means that the thought is placed in some temporal perspective and in the act of speech it acquires some modal characteristics. By way of comparing a word and a sentence it’s worth mentioning that a word is a nominative unit of language, while a sentence is a predicative unit, i.e. it presents some objects as making up a situation and reflects the connection between the nominal denotation of the event, on the one hand, and the objective reality, on the other, showing the time, indicating reality or unreality, desirability, or necessity. Another difference between a sentence and a word is that a word exists ready-made, while a sentence is created by the speaker in the course of communication. Thus a sentence performs two essential functions: firstly, the nominative function; and secondly, reality-evaluating, or predicative function.

All these dimensions correspond to the aspects of the sentence and constitute levels of its analysis⁷⁴. Nevertheless this is not the only possible approach within the framework of modern linguistics. The structural, semantic and communicative aspects of the sentence are matched with other levels of the analysis of the sentence. Thus, V.G. Gak sees it necessary to analyze

• the semantic level (showing what the sentence is about in terms of semantic roles or cases; in addition to that, propositions are addressed in order to determine the nominative value of the sentence);

• the logic and communicative level (this is fulfilled through the reference to the analysis of theme-rheme division);

• the syntactic level (the analysis of the formal structure of the sentence, members of the sentence).

These three levels do not exhaust the analysis of the sentence and should be supplemented with

• the analysis of the emotional expressive aspect of the sentence,

• its discursive communicative role, i.e. the role of the sentence in the formation of discourse (initiating, maintaining contact, responding the interlocutor, etc.),

• the pragmatic meaning, which is additional and is brought in by the situation of communication [Гак 2000: 547-550].

There are other approaches to the analysis of the sentence as well. All of them have contributed in one way or another to the construction of a comprehensive theory of the sentence.

Thus a sentence turns out to be quite a complex, many-faceted phenomenon, and it is quite a task for a linguist to represent its constitutive features in a concise definition. M.Y. Blokh defines a sentence as “an immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose” [Блох 1983: 229-231]. A similar definition is given in the Theoretical grammar of English by I.P. Ivanova, V.V. Burlakova, G.G. Pocheptsov: a sentence is a minimal syntactic construction used in acts of speech communication, characterized by predicativity and realizing a certain syntactic structure [Иванова, Бурлакова, Почепцов 1981: 164]. L.P. Vinokurova adds some more detail to this definition. She writes that a sentence is the smallest, semantically complete, intonationally delimited unit of speech, of a certain grammatical structure. It directly reflects reality and expresses an attitude towards reality [Винокурова 1954: 223]. V.L. Kaushanskaya arrives at the conclusion that 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 also a means of revealing the speaker’s attitude to it [Каушанская 1963: 221].