The sentence

There is no universally acknowledged definition of the sentence. Here is the definition given by academic Vinogradov:

«Предложение это грамматически оформленная по законам данного языка целостная единица речи, являющаяся главным средством формирования, выражения и мысли».

The sentence is a minimum syntactic construction used in acts of speech communication, which is characterized by perdicativity and is build according to a certain structural pattern (prof. Pocheptsov).

So, a sentence is a unit of speech and a unit of language. It is a unit of speech because it is create d during a speech process. It is a unit of language because it is built according to a certain scheme, which belongs to language. The specific characteristics of the sentence are: predicativity and intonation of utterance.

Predicativity is the relation of the content of the sentence to reality, to the situation of speech communication. Predicativity is reveled in the categories of modality, tense and person.

Modality is the assessment of the content of the sentence from the point of view of reality, which is grammatically expressed by mood forms and intonation (objective reality) and lexically – by modal words (subjective modality).

The sentence has form and meaning.

We may speak of material and grammatical meaning of the sentence. Material meaning of the sentence is its individual content. It is formed by lexical meaning if words it consists of. Grammatical meaning of the sentence is its generalized content peculiar not to one sentence only but to the whole class of sentences of the same structure. Examples:

The boy is reading a book.

The girl is cutting bread.

She is washing the floor.

All the sentences are built according to the same pattern and have the same grammatical meaning: they denote an active influence of the object upon another one.

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Constituent and constructive sentence analysis

The sentence structure can be analyzed in two aspects – constituent one and constructive one.

Constituent sentence analysis is its segmentation. Constructive sentence analysis suggests finding out structural value of its components, finding out the components without which the sentence cannot function as a unit of speech communication.

There are several ways of segmentation of the sentence. Their names correspond to those of basic syntactic units (parts of the sentence analysis, immediate consistence – IC – analysis).

Part of sentence is a bilateral linguistic sign, which has meaning and form. Its meaning is its syntactic function. The form of the part of sentence comprises not only the morphological form but also characteristics connected with availability or absence of function words and with words position in the sentence.

A two-member sentence is divided into the subject group and the predicate group. This is the upper limit of segmentation. Part of sentence is the low limit of segmentation.

IC sentence analyses is carried out in such a way that at each stage of segmentation are singled out two segments of maximum length. The minimum short segments are words.

Constructive sentence analysis is based upon the principle of distinguishing between two sides in the sentence structure: 1) what is necessary determined by the syntactic system of the language and 2) what is the product of speech activity of the author of the sentence.

A sentence is built according to a certain structural scheme. The structural scheme of the sentence is its simplest pattern. This pattern is called a nuclear sentence. A construction build according to a nuclear sentence is called an elementary sentence. The nuclear sentence is a unit of language. The elementary sentence is a unit of speech.

Here are examples of nuclear sentences and elementary sentences:

NN Birds fly.