Simple Sentence

7 Key excerpts on "Simple Sentence"

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  eBook - ePub

  Structure and Meaning in English

  A Guide for Teachers

  • Graeme Kennedy(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 the word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.) were mentioned. In language use, words are grouped together in grammatical structures to express meaning. A sentence is one such unit of linguistic description. Most fluent speakers of a language have a sense of the ‘unity’ and ‘completeness’ of what is said or written and can identify when a string of words is not ‘well formed’ or ‘grammatical’. For this reason it has sometimes been said that sentences have a psychological as well as a grammatical reality.

  For example, in the following examples most people would agree that 1 has a sense of completeness while 2–5 seem incomplete. Sentence 2 has no subject (we don’t know who has dinner). While 3, 4 and 5 have a subject, the rest (the predicate) seems incomplete. (* Shows structures that are not grammatical.)

      1  I have dinner about 7 o’clock most nights.

      2  *have dinner about 7 o’clock most nights.

      3  *I have about 7 o’clock most nights.

      4  *I have dinner 7 o’clock most nights.

      5  *I have dinner about 7 o’clock most.

  Sentences normally have at least a subject and a verb (but not always, especially when we speak). A Simple Sentence consists of a single clause containing one verb phrase. It can be joined to other clauses by means of conjunctions to make complex sentences. These are described in Chapter 7 .

  Before looking more closely at the parts of Simple Sentences, we need to be aware that in spoken English conversation, which is by far the most typical or frequent use of the language, the concept of ‘sentence’ is often rather different from that which is considered appropriate in written English. When we speak, our ideas usually flow in such a way that, in addition to saying what we intend, we also make false starts, change direction, leave things unfinished, and so on. When we speak, our utterances

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  Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • David Hornsby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 ). For linguists, syntax means the study of the set of rules governing the way that morphemes, words, clauses and phrases are used to form sentences in any given language.

  However, the distinction between ‘word-level’ and ‘sentence-level’ grammar is far from watertight, and there is a considerable grey area between the two. Linguists sometimes refer to morphosyntax when describing phenomena which straddle both levels: grammatical gender, for example, often manifests itself at word level in inflection, but may also affect relations between items within a sentence in the case of the syntactic phenomenon of agreement (or concord).

  Subjects and predicates

  Calling syntax ‘the grammar of sentences’ is all very well, but sentences prove as difficult to define as ‘words’ did in the previous chapter. We are used, in literate societies with a written-language bias, to thinking of a sentence as something that generally begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, but this does not get us very far. A traditional definition of a sentence as ‘the expression of a complete thought’ is not helpful either: are elderberry wine, exactly or good! not ‘complete thoughts’? In traditional grammar, sentences were required to have a subject and a predicate, i.e. something we are talking about (the subject) and then something said about it (the predicate):

  1  Dinosaurs existed.

  2  Samantha is preparing for her bar examinations.

  3  Paul gave a tip to the waiter.

  Identifying the subject in Latin, Russian or Polish would be straightforward, because the nouns would be case-marked, i.e. inflected according to their function in the sentence. This is no longer true of English (though it used to be), but pronouns – with the exception of third-person singular it – do retain case-marked forms, so we can apply a substitution test. Thus in the list above, the subjects are Dinosaurs, Samantha and Paul, because they alone can be replaced by subject (or nominative) forms (they, she and he

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  Child Language Acquisition

  Contrasting Theoretical Approaches

  • Ben Ambridge, Elena V. M. Lieven(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 Simple syntax A sentence is not simply a set of words (e.g. cat , dog , bit ), but also contains the grammatical information necessary to allow the listener to determine ‘who did what to whom’ (and also whether the utterance is a statement or a question, and so on). As we saw in the previous chapter , many languages convey this information by means of morphology (e.g. nominative and accusative noun markers). Many languages, with English being a prime example, instead rely primarily on word order. For example, basic declarative English sentences use SUBJECT–VERB–OBJECT word order to mark the AGENT, ACTION and PATIENT of an event respectively (e.g. The dog bit the cat means something different to The cat bit the dog ). Although some languages (arguably) exhibit entirely ‘free’ word order (i.e. all word orders are possible, equally common and convey the same meaning), most retain a ‘default’ word order that is used for the majority of basic declarative sentences (and which guides interpretation when case marking is not present), even when case marking makes word-order information redundant. Our main focus in this chapter is the question of how children learning word-order languages acquire the word-order ‘rules’ of their language. How-ever, we will also discuss data from languages in which morphological cues to meaning override word-order information. We focus here on Simple Sentences : sentences with only one clause (e.g. The dog bit the cat ). Complex sentences – those with a main and a dependent (or subordinate) clause (e.g. John said [that the dog bit the cat] ) – are discussed in Chapter 7 . Although, in Section 6.3 , we also discuss constructions such as the dative and locative , we generally focus on transitive and intransitive sentences (e.g. The dog bit the cat ; The dog barked ); those that contain only a SUBJECT, VERB and (for transitive sentences) OBJECT.

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  Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

  • Celia Kerslake, Aslı Göksel(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART 3 SYNTAX: THE STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES 12 SIMPLE AND COMPLEX SENTENCES From the structural point of view, sentences are either simple (i.e. contain only a main clause, as in (1)) or complex (i.e. contain a main clause and one or more subordinate clauses, as in (2)): (1) Dün okullar aç ı ld ı . ‘The schools opened yesterday.’ (2) Dün [yolda giderken] [y ı llard ı r görmedi ğ im] bir arkada ş ı ma rastlad ı m. ‘Yesterday, [as I was walking along the street], I ran into a friend [whom I hadn’t seen for years].’ In this book we indicate subordinate clauses using ‘[]’ (square brackets). In 12.1 we discuss the main constituents of Simple Sentences, and in 12.2 we focus on the agreement between the subject and the predicate. The structure of complex sentences is summarized in 12.3 , and different types of subordinate clauses are discussed in detail in Chapters 24 – 7 . Sentences can also be classified functionally, as statements, questions, volitional utterances and exclamations . These are discussed in 12.4 . 12.1 CONSTITUENTS OF A SENTENCE: SUBJECT AND PREDICATE 12.1.1 PREDICATE The predicate expresses an event, a process or a state in which the subject is involved: (3) Necla bir hafta içinde projeyi bitirecek . ‘Necla will complete the project within a week.’ (4) Bu çocuk hasta . ‘This child is ill .’ The predicate of a Simple Sentence, or of the main clause in a complex sentence, is described as finite . According to the type of predicate they have, sentences in Turkish are divided into two main groups, verbal sentences and nominal sentences. 12.1.1.1 Verbal sentences These are sentences whose predicates are finite verbs ( 8.2 (i)): (5) Bu gün evde kal-a-ma-m . stay-PSB-NEG.AOR-1SG ‘I can’t stay at home today.’ For a detailed discussion of the properties of such sentences, see Chapter 13 .

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  A Critical Account of English Syntax

  Grammar, Meaning, Text

  • Keith Brown, Jim Miller(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  206 Sentences and clauses SENTENCES AND CLAUSES: INTRODUCTION Both clause and sentence are very traditional units of grammatical description and analysis and both are very difficult to define. (By a rough reckoning more than two hundred definitions of ‘sentence’ have been proposed.) Many analysts take sentences as basic and define them as the largest unit subject to rules of grammar. A clause is then said to be a unit that can be seen as like a sentence in structure, or as resulting from some sentence structure being reduced. Other analysts take the concept of construction as basic, define clauses as a grammatical units incorporating some construction, say agent-patient as in The dog barked or The python attacked the crocodile , and then define the sentence as the largest grammatical unit. Here we take the concept of construction as basic. † Constructions are arrangements of smaller bits and pieces into bigger chunks: which sort of units combine, how many, and in what order. Word forms are constructions consisting of stems and roots, prefixes and suffixes, as in deselections – de + select + ion + s . The internal structure of words is not part of syntactic analysis; we are concerned rather with how whole words combine to make phrases, how phrases combine to make clauses and how clauses combine to make sentences. Our central syntactic unit or construction is the clause. Our reasons for this decision are these. Dependency relations between words and the distributional properties of words and phrases are densest inside single clauses. Dependency relations occasionally cross from one clause to another or even, in written texts, from one sentence to another but these long-distance connections are quite a minor phenomenon. The classic criteria for distribution – substitution and transposition – apply inside single clauses. In books on formal syntax, discussions of constitu-ent structure and distribution almost always offer examples consisting of a single clause.

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  Semantics and Syntax in Complementation

  • Peter Menzel(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Simple SentenceS 37 phers' classification of Simple Sentences, particularly from the point of view of the linguistic evidence for the classification proposed by the philosophers; and, since this work deals with complementation, with particular attention to those aspects of the philosophers' classification which sheds some light onto the processes involved in complementation. In other words, then, the purpose of this chapter is to examine how the philosophers' classification of sentence types is related to and reflected in the linguists' classification of sentence types. I hope to show that the relationship between the two clas-sifications is not one-to-one with respect to Simple Sentences, but is one-to-one with respect to embedded sentences, particularly with respect to complements. Before turning to the main topic of this chapter, I should like to clarify the terminology to be employed here and throughout the rest of this work. For the sake of convenience (i.e. not for any principled reason), I will employ the label (linguistic) sentence type for the syntactic classification of sentences by linguists, and the label description types for the philosophers' classification of which aspect of the real world an utterance describes. 2.1 SENTENCE TYPES Grammarians usually recognize the following sentence types for Simple Sentences: declarative performative 2 interrogative imperative 3 Grammarians say that a sentence is a declarative, interrogative, 2 For justification of why performatives constitute a separate type of sentence, see section 2.1.1, below. 3 Some grammarians have added negation as a separate sentence type, but it is clear that negations do not constitute a sentence type because they can be applied to at least three of the sentence types listed above; i.e. there are ne-gative statements, negative questions, and negative imperatives.

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  Language

  Its Structure and Use

  • Edward Finegan, , , (Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  178 Chapter 5 The Structure and Function of Phrases and Sentences: Syntax Summary • The operations governing the formation of sentences constitute the syntax of a language. The study of sentence structure is also called syntax. • Languages generally have referring expressions and predication expressions. • In syntactic terms, a referring expression is a noun phrase (NP) and a predica-tion expression a verb phrase (VP). • Sentences (and clauses) consist of a verb and an appropriate set of NPs. • Speakers can generate an unlimited number of sentences from a finite number of operations for combining phrases. • Phrase-structure expansion rules generate underlying constituent structures. • Syntactic operations change one constituent structure into another one. • Positing underlying constituent structures captures the striking regularity of certain relationships between sentences that are otherwise not apparent on the surface. • Positing underlying structures helps explain some elements of meaning and cer-tain syntactic and semantic relationships between sentences. • In order to explain how speakers relate two structures to one another (such as Sydney doesn’t believe in poltergeists and Doesn’t Sydney believe in poltergeists? ), linguists posit an operation that transforms the structure underlying the basic declarative sentence into the structure underlying the interrogative one. • It appears that the most important and most general syntactic operations involve movement such as wh-movement. What Do You Think? REVISITED 1. Clarence and productivity . We hear some expressions so frequently that it’s easy to imagine how we know them. Most things we say and read, though, we haven’t said, heard, or read before. But the structures that underlie what we say and length or structure for a daily newspaper—and they are not difficult to understand, despite their length and syntactic complexity. 1. After handing over the documents, he told The Guardian of his admiration for both Pfc.

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