The sentence as a communicative unit.

SENTENCE: GENERAL

The sentence as the main unit of syntax.

The sentence as a communicative unit.

The sentence is the central object of study in syntax. It can be defined as the immediate integral unit of speech built up by words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose.

A sentence can consist of only one word, e.g.: Why? Thanks.

But a word making up a sentence is thereby turned into an utterance-unit expressing various connections between the situation described and actual reality. So, the definition of the sentence as a predicative lingual unit gives prominence to the basic differential feature of the sentence as a separate lingual unit: it performs the nominative signemic function, like the word or the phrase, and at the same time it performs the reality-evaluating, or predicative function.

The sentence belongs primarily to the sphere of speech; earlier logical and psychological oriented grammar treated the sentence as a portion of the flow of words of one speaker containing a complete thought.

Being a unit of speech, the sentence is distinguished by a relevant intonation: each sentence possesses certain intonation contours, including pauses, pitch movements and stresses, which separate one sentence from another in the flow of speech and, together with various segmental means of expression, participate in rendering essential communicative-predicative meanings.

Speech presents only one aspect of language in the broad sense of the term, which dialectically combines the system of language, language proper, and the immediate realization of it in the process of intercourse, speech proper.

The sentence as a unit of communication also includes two sides inseparably connected with each other: fixed in the system of the language are sentence patterns, which speakers follow when constructing their own utterances in actual speech. The number of utterances is infinite; the number of sentence patterns in the system of language is definite, and they are the object of study in grammar.

The center of predication in the sentence is the finite form of the verb, the predicate. Besides the predicate, other elements of the sentence also help express predication: for example, word order, various functional words and, in oral speech, intonation.

Predication is the basic differential feature of the sentence, but not the only one. There is a profound difference between the nominative function of the word and the nominative function of the sentence. The nominative content of a syntagmatically complete average sentence, called a proposition, reflects a processual situation, an event that includes a certain process as its dynamic center, the agent of the process, the objects of the process, and various conditions and circumstances of the realization of the process. The situation, together with its various elements, is reflected through the nominative parts (members) of the sentence, distinguished in the traditional syntactic division of the sentence, which can also be defined as its nominative division. No separate word, no matter how many stems it consists of, can express the situation-nominative semantics of a proposition.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-19