22. Sentence.

One of the most difficult theoretical problems concern­ing the sentence which has remained unsolved to this day is the problem of the definition of the sentence. Sen­tence (Latin sentential) literally denotes an opinion, judgement, or sentiment.

In the history of linguistics at least four principal types of definition of the sentence are known: logical, psychological, structural (or grammatical) and phonetic definitions.

There are over 300 definitions of the sentence for language students to cope with but none of them is generally accepted. The old traditional definition is the following: a sentence is a group of words containing a ­subject and predicate and expressing a complete thought. The definition fails because there is no objective stand­ard by which to judge the completeness of the thought; it assumes that the reader knows the meaning of the phrase “a complete thought". The definition also fails because it rules out all verbless sentences (When? Why? Fire!).

Another favourite 'practical definition used to count the number of sentences in any written material is phrased as follows: -a sentence is a word or group of words standing between an initial capital letter and a mark of end punctuation. However, this definition does not get us very far either. As stated by L.L.Iofik, punctuation cannot serve as an objective criterion for dividing a text into sentences.

The main requirements for a definition of a sentence, according to B.Ilyish, are as follows;

I) it must state the relation of the sentence, a unit of language, to thought.

2) it must take into account the specific structure of the language in question,

3) it must leave room for as many possible varieties of sentence as can be reasonably expected to occur in the given language.

Ch.C. Fries' definition of the sentence is “an independ­ent linguistic form, not included by virtue of any grammatical construction in any larger linguistic form" (

One of the most important features of the sentence that distinguishes it from any combination of words is predication, i.e. the relation of an utterance to reality. Thus the utterances "the doctor's arrival" and "the doctor arrived" both include the same lexical units and their lexical content is the same as well as both express something about the same person (the doctor) and the same action (arrival).

Predication is as a rule expressed by the finite verbal forms.

Another most important feature of the sentence which distinguishes it from a phrase is intonation.

23. Actual Division of the Sentence.

The actual division of the sentence, called also the "functional sentence perspective", exposes the informative perspective of the sentence showing what immediate semantic contribution the sentence parts make to the total information conveyed by the sentence. The sentence can be divided into two sections – theme and rheme.

The theme is the part of the proposition that is being talked about (predicated). The theme expresses the starting point of communication; it means that it denotes an object or a phenomenon about which something is reported. Once stated, the theme is therefore "old news", i.e. the things already mentioned and understood.

The predicate that gives information on the topic is called rheme. The rheme expresses the basic informative part of the communication, emphasizing its contextually relevant centre. Between the theme and the rheme are positioned intermediary, transitional parts of the actual division of various degrees of informative value (these parts are sometimes called "transition").

The theme of the actual division of the sentence may or may not coincide with the subject of the sentence. The rheme of the actual division, in its turn, may or may not coincide with the predicate of the sentence — either with the whole predicate group or its part, such as the predicative, the object, the adverbial.