44. The sentence as a main unit of syntax.

A sentence is the largest and most complicated unit of language and at the same time it is the smallest unit of speech, or the smallest utterance. In speech sentences are not given ready-made; they are created by the speaker. But they are built according to patterns existing in the language. The Sentence is a communicative unit made up of words in conformity with their combinability and structurally united by intonation and predicativity.

A sentence has two basic meaningful functions: naming and communicative.

Compare the following structures:

(1) The doctor’s arrival.

(2) The doctor arrived.

These two structures name the same event, but (1) is not correlated with the situation of speech and does not convey information about the reality or the time of the event; (2) is correlated with the situation of speech and shows that the event took place in the past.

The three main aspects of the sentence are syntactic, semantic and logico-communicative.

The syntactic structure of the sentence can be analyzed at two levels:

• pre-functional (sentence constituents are words and word groups)

• functional (sentence constituents are parts of the sentence).

There is no direct correspondence between units of these levels.

The following two definitions have been most often used in grammar books: (1) A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought and (2) A sentence is a group of words that contains an unsubordinated subject and predicate.

The first of these, a “notional” definition, fails because it is wholly subjective. There is no objective standard by which to judge the completeness of a thought. On the other hand, the second definition is not more than half truth, for it rules out all verbless sentences, which may be just as “complete” and independent as the verb sentences.

45. Predicativity. Predication.

Predicativity is the relation of the thought of a sentence to the situation of speech. Predicativity has three main components: modality, time and person, expressed by the categories of mood, tense and person. So the predicate verb is the main means of expressing predicativity.

The person component of predicativity is also expressed by the subject. Thus predicativity is expressed by the subject-predicate group, or predication. Predication constitutes the basic structure of the sentence.

In the sentence - He thought over it for a moment – the predication is he thought. He indicates the person, thought – the tense and mood components of predicativity. In the sentence Show it to me there is one-word predication, show containing the mood component of predicativity. The person component is only implied.

Predicativity is also expressed by intonation.

The main parts of the sentence are those whose function it is to make the predication. They are the subject and the predicate of the sentence. Khaimovich and Rogovskaya consider that it is essential to apply the same principles to the subject and the predicate. The correlation between the structural and the notional in the principal parts of the sentence may be of four types:

1. the structural and the notional are united in one word – Birds fly;

2. the structural and the notional are in different units – It is necessary to add;

3. Only the structural is given in the sentence – Is it raining? – It is;

4. Only the notional is present – What is he doing? – Sleeping

It should be noted, that some scholars use only one term — predication to denote both the relation of the sentence to reality and means of its expression.

A sentence may contain primary and secondary predication:I heard someone ringing

The group someone ringing is called the secondary predication. It cannot be correlated with reality directly and cannot constitute an independent unit of communication, as verbals have no categories of mood, tense and person. The secondary predication is related to the situation of speech indirectly, through the primary predications.

As the bus was very crowded john had to stand. (primary) The bus being crowded John had to stand. (secondary)

Secondary predications or complexes may be regarded as a transformation of some actual predication.

46. Principles of classification of sentences. As is well-known, sentences may be classified on the basis of two main principles: structural (simple and composite, one-member and two member, complete and elliptical) and communicative (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory).

In the language system certain sentence-patterns are correlated and are connected by oppositional relations:

• Statement/question (He knows it – Does he know it?)

• non-negative/negative structures (Does he know it? — Doesn't he know it?)

• non-emphatic/emphatic structures (Come! — Do come!).

Syntactic oppositions reveal syntactic categories (their number varies with different scholars).

Khaimovich and Rogovskaya distinguish 3 syntactic categories: 1.Of presentation – shows if a sentence is represented as a statement or a question.

2Of information – opposition between confirmative and negative sentences.

3Of expressiveness – the meanings of emphatic and non-emphatic are realized. Emphasis is expressed by a strong stress on a word morpheme.Members of syntactic oppositions can be regarded as grammatical modifications, or variants of sentence patterns. Thus, the syntactic structure of the sentence may be represented by a number of forms, which constitute the paradigm of the sentence.

47. ONE-MEMBER SENTENCES AND ELLIPTICAL SENTENCES

One-member sentences are those sentences which have no separate subject and predicate but one main part only instead. An elliptical sentence is a sentence in which one or more word-forms in the principal positions are omitted. Ellipsis here refers only to the structural elements of the sentence, not the informational ones. This means that those words can be omitted, because they have only grammatical, structural relevance, and do not carry any new relevant information.

In English elliptical sentences are only those having no word-forms in the subject and predicate positions, i. e., in the positions which constitute the structural core of the sentence.

There are several types of elliptical sentences.

1. Sentences without a word-form in the subject position.Looks like rain.

2. Sentences without word-forms in the subject position and part of the predicate position. In such cases the omitted part of the predicate may be either a) an auxiliary verb or b) a link verb.

a) Going home soon?

b) Free this evening?

3. Sentences without a word-form only in part of the predicate position, which may be an auxiliary or a link verb.

You seen them?

4. Sentences without word-forms both in the subject and the predicate position. Such ellipses occur in various responses.Where’re you going? - Home.

5. Sentences without a word-form in the predicate position. Such ellipses occur only in replies to questions.

Who lives there? - Jack.

What’s happened? - Nothing.