ГОС_1 / The simple sentence and its essential features
..docx12. The simple sentence and its essential features
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.
It is rather difficult to define the sentence as it is connected with many lingual and extra lingual aspects – logical, psychological and philosophical. We will just stick to one of them - according to academician G.Pocheptsov, the sentence is the central syntactic construction used as the minimal communicative unit that has its primary predication, actualises a definite structural scheme and possesses definite intonation characteristics.
The most essential features of the sentence as a linguistic unit are a) its structural characteristics – subject-predicate relations (primary predication), and b) its semantic characteristics – it refers to some fact in the objective reality.
According to the purpose of the utterance we distinguish 4 kinds of sentences:
1- 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.
2- 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!).
3- 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 several kinds of questions:
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)
Alternative questions, indicating choice
Do you live in town or in the country?
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
You speak English, don’t you?
4- 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!)
The main categories of the sentence are predicativity, modality and negation.
Predicativity is a category which refers the nominative contents of the sentence to reality
V.G.Gak points out three main approaches to the understanding of predicativity: logical, denotational (semantic) and formal (syntactic). In the logic-oriented syntactic theories predicativity is defined as an act of attributing certain features to the subject (predicativity presents a combination of two components of thought: the subject of thought and the predicate of thought which denotes a property, attributed to the subject by the predicate). In the denotational (semantic) approach predicativity expresses the relation of the sentence to the concrete situation of reality. From the syntactic point of view predicativity is defined as an establishment of syntactic relation between the subject and the predicate of the sentence carried out with the help of certain morphological categories. These three approaches are not contradictory, they just reflect the manysided nature of the phenomenon and the possibility to analyze its essence from different aspects. Predicativity involves establishing subject-predicate relations which, in its turn, is accomplished through the grammatical categories of tense, mood, number and person. Predicativity takes into consideration two aspects of the sentence: semantic, or denotational (the nominative contents, or the situation of reality expressed by the sentence) and syntactic (the establishment of subject-predicate relations carried out with the help of certain grammatical categories). In peripheral structural types of sentences, such as one-member nominative sentences predicativity is expressed by the intonation (Early spring. London at night). The expression of predicativity in the sentence is usually referred to as predication. Scholars differentiate between primary and secondary predication and also between explicit (ясно выражен.) and implicit types of predication. Primary predication establishes subject-predicate relations and makes the backbone (основа) of the sentence. It is expresses by the finite form of the verb. E.g. Cranes are flying. Secondary predication is contained in gerundial, infinitival, participial constructions, detached (отсоедин.) parts of the sentence. Such structures name an event but do not place it in time, e.g. I saw cranes flying. Structures of secondary predication cannot function as autonomous sentences and they are related to the objective reality only through the main predicative line of the sentence. From the point of view of their derivational history these structures are the result of syntactic transformation of two simple sentences and joining them into one. E.g. I saw cranes. The cranes were flying. — I saw cranes flying.