Lecture 7
The Sentence
General notion. Functional perspective of the sentence.
Classification of sentences.
Recommended literature
1) Блох М.Я. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка. – М.: Высшая школа, 2006.
2) Блох М.Я. Практикум по теоретической грамматике английского языка: Учеб. пособие. – М.: Высшая школа, 2007. – 471 с.
3) Блох М.Я. Теоретические основы грамматики. – М.: Высшая школа, 2005.
(1) Sentence is a unit of the highest, syntactic level in the language structure.
It has been studied as long as linguistics exists and still there is no universal definition of a sentence. Nowadays there are about 300 definitions of the sentence as a phenomenon, but none of them is absolutely adequate. Why is it so difficult to define a sentence? Probably because it is, as it was mentioned by Quirk, Svartvik, Leech, Greenbaum, constantly varies becoming undeterminable. Namely, the problem is the following: the sentence lies on a borderline between language and speech, belonging to each of them at the same time. Thus, the term “sentence” can be used, as it is pointed out by M.Y. Blokh, in two senses, denoting a unit of a language and a unit of speech.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to note, that not all the scholars share this point of view. It is becoming traditional to recognize a sentence as a unit of language and “utterance” as a unit of speech. Such point of view is expressed in the works by Ю.А. Левицкий, В.Я. Плоткин, Н.А. Слюсарева etc. it goes back to the 20-ies of the XXth century when our outstanding scholar and a citizen of Saransk М.М. Бахтин wrote: “what they (the linguists) treat as a sentence is an utterance in reality”.
To differentiate between a sentence as a unit of language (c.f. She is clever) and utterance as a unit of speech (Oh! Clever?) is quite logical it simplifies the problem. So, prof. Blokh’s point of view seems to be the most adequate, i.e. sentence has a two-aspective character. He defines the sentence in the following way: “The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up pf words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose”.
The building-up a sentence according to a definite syntactic pattern does not contradict the existence of one-word sentences of the type “Night”. Moreover, a word-sentence as a unit of the text is radically different from a word-lexeme as a unit of vocabulary. Unlike the word, the sentence does not exist in the system of language as a ready-made unit. More than that: a sentence is characterized by intonation, a word is not.
These are two characteristic features of a sentence. The third one is the most important, it is predication.
It should be noted that the category of predication is one of the most debatable in the science of language. We’ll understand predication as a category which establishes the relation of the named phenomena to actual life.
The centre of predication in a sentence of verbal type, which predominates in English, is a finite verb. The finite verb expresses essential predicative meanings by its categorical forms, first of all, the categories of tense and mood, as it was stated in all classical works on syntax (V.V. Vinogradov, H. Sweet). According to modern point of view, besides the purely verbal categories in the predicative semantics are included such syntactic sentence meanings as purposes of communication, modal probability, affirmation and negation, and others, which, taken together, make the sentence a unit of the proposemic level of lingual hierarchy.