Languages & Linguistics
Sentence Fragments
Sentence fragments are incomplete sentences that lack a subject, verb, or both. They do not express a complete thought and can be confusing for readers. It is important to avoid sentence fragments in writing to ensure clarity and coherence.
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4 Key excerpts on "Sentence Fragments"
- Cheryl Glenn, Loretta Gray(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
In English, however, subject pronouns must be included in all except imperative sentences. MULTILINGUAL WRITERS Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 frag 23b 543 23b P HRA S E S A S S ENTENCE F RAGMENT S A phrase is a group of words without a subject and/or a predicate (22a). ). When punctuated as a sentence (that is, with a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point at the end), a phrase becomes a fragment. You can revise such a fragment by attaching it to a related sentence, usually the one preceding it. Verbal phrase as a fragment Early humans valued color. Creating r. Creating ^ permanent colors with natural pigments. , c r ea t i n g Only a full sentence will m ake sense in this frame sentence. If a test sentence, other than an imperative, does not fit into the frame sentence, it is a fragment. Test sentence 3: Because it can be played almost anywhere. Test: They do not understand the idea that because it can be played almost anywhere. [The frame sentence does not make sense, so the test sentence is a fragment.] Test sentence 4: Ultimate Frisbee is a popular sport because it can be played almost anywhere. Test: They do not understand the idea that Ultimate Frisbee is a popular sport because it can be played almost anywhere. [The frame sentence makes sense, so the test sentence is complete.] 4. Rewrite any senten ce you think might be a fragment as a question that can be answered with yes or no . Only complete sentences can be rewritten this way. Test sentence 5: That combines aspects of soccer, football, and basketball. Test: Is that combines aspects of soccer, football, and basketball? [The question does not make sense, so the test sentence is a fragment.] Test sentence 6: Ultimate Frisbee is a game that combines aspects of soccer, football, and basketball.
- Susan Fawcett(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Below are the same groups of words written as complete sentences: (1) People will bet on almost anything. (2) For example, every winter the Nenana River in Alaska freezes. (3) The townspeople often make bets on the date of the breakup of the ice. (4) Someone must guess the exact day and time of day. (5) Recently, the lucky guess won $300,000. 134 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. CHAPTER 11 Avoiding Sentence Fragments 135 © 2019 Cengage Learning, Inc. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part. Every sentence must have both a subject and a verb—and must express a complete thought . A fragment is not a complete sentence because it lacks either a subject or a complete verb—or does not express a complete thought . PRACTICE 1 All of the following are fragments because they lack a subject, a verb, or both. Add a subject, a verb, or both to make the fragments into sentences. Answers will vary. EXAMPLE: Raising onions in the backyard. Rewrite: Charles is raising onions in the backyard. 1. Melts easily. Rewrite: On a hot day in Alabama, butter melts easily. 2. That couple on the street corner. Rewrite: That couple on the street corner just won the lottery. 3. One of the fans. Rewrite: One of the fans caught a fly ball. 4. Manages a GameStop store. Rewrite: My next-door neighbor manages a GameStop store. 5. The tip of her nose. Rewrite: The tip of her nose was red from the cold. 6. DVR players. Rewrite: DVR players are replacing DVD players in many homes.
- Keith Allan, Julie Bradshaw, Geoffrey Finch(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
But it is clearly not so for all sentences. In actual speech we often abbreviate utterances and elide elements in order to maintain fluency and avoid pointless repetition as in the exchange in (1). (1) Q. Where are you going? A. To Tim’s. Here the sequence To Tim’s can only function as a reply because the full meaning is recoverable from the context. Sentence Fragments or subsen-tences of this kind are frequent in speech and increasingly common in writing, too. They have always been a feature of novels or short stories, where the aim is to reproduce the utterance flavour of language, but they can also be found in advertisements and even public announcements. Geoffrey Leech (in English in Advertising . London: Longman. 1966) has called this style ‘public colloquial’ and observed its growing frequency in written English as a phenomenon of late twentieth-century culture. Sentences, then, are units of style as well as grammar. This raises the problem of how we can formally describe them in grammatical terms. How can we arrive at a description which takes account of both the fully independent kind and the Sentence Fragments? We can make a start by distinguishing, as some linguists do, between sentences and subsentences (some-times referred to as ‘major’ and ‘minor’ clauses or sentences). Subsentences are incomplete in some way. This useful terminological distinction enables us to focus our attention, for purposes of grammatical description, on full sentences, the major variety. It also allows us to discern two sets of rules here: first, the grammatical rules which govern sentence formation, and second, text formation rules, which operate on sentences when they become part of connected discourse. Sentences may consist of one clause or more. In Chomskyan linguistics, clauses are normally dubbed sentences, the single clause sentence being a simple sentence. A sentence with more than one clause is compound if the constituent clauses are linked by conjunctions e.g.
eBook - PDFPunctuation as a Means of Medium-Dependent Presentation Structure in English
Exploring the Guide Functions of Punctuation
- Sebastian Patt(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Narr Francke Attempto(Publisher)
– Grammatical units: sentence ↔ clause ↔ phrase (or group) ↔ word ↔ morpheme. The sentence is considered the highest-ranking structural unit at the gram-matical level, whereas the morpheme is ranked lowest, cf. Fig. 2.6 above. The morpheme, having no grammatically analysable structure, is the small-est meaningful unit and therefore it constitutes also the smallest linguis-tic sign to be perceived by a decoder. In the public perception it is usually words or word-forms that “[…] enable people to refer to every object, action, and quality that members of a society wish to distinguish […]” (Quirk et al. 1985: 11). Although the notion ‘word’ allows for different conceptions, cf. e.g. Robins (1990 [1964]: 185f.), Lipka (2002: 85, 88f.) and Plag (2008 [2003]: Issues of linguistic description 29 4–9), it is first of all a formal unit of the medium-independent expression system: undisputedly, the sense(s) of a word exist(s) independently of the medium in which it is realised, cf. sec. 2.1.1 above. Section 2.1.2 has shown that syntactic analysis (and hence the decoding of verbal messages) depends on units larger than morpheme or word: phras-es (groups) and sentences. Traditionally, especially the sentence has played an important role as a referential unit in this context. However, its definition has been a constant and profoundly disputed topic. There seem to be sus-tained difficulties in grasping it conceptually and in linguistic approaches, the notion ‘sentence’ has been defined inconsistently throughout. Especially the common approach to capture ‘sentence’ by defining it as ‘a complete thought’ has stirred up many theoretical problems, cf. Levinson (1985: 6), Euler (1991: 64f.) and Herbst/Schüller (2008: 3f.). Cutting these considerations short, what makes a sentence complete or incomplete is not determined by a philosophical decision, but by the incom-pleteness of its inherent grammatical structure as in (4), cf.
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