16. The sentence. Predicativity

[grammarshit2]

1. A sentence is a proposition expressed by words (something true). A proposition is the semantic invariant of all the members of modal and communicative paradigms of sentences and their transforms. But besides sentences which contain propositions there are interrogative and negative sentences. Speech is emotional. There is no one to one relationship. Then a sentence can be grammatically correct, but from the point of view of logic it won’t be correct, true to life (Water is a gas). Laws of thinking are universal but there are many languages. Grammar and Logic don’t coincide.
2. A sentence is a subject-predicate structure. What are the subject and the predicate? Grammatical subject can only be defined in terms of the sentence. Moreover the grammatical subject often does not indicate what we are ‘talking about’ (The birds have eaten all the fruit. It is getting cold). Besides, this definition leaves out verbless sentences. There are one-member sentences. They are non-sentences? Conclusion – a sentence is a structural scheme.
3. Phonological: A sentence is a flow of speech between 2 pauses. But speech is made up of incomplete, interrupted, unfinished, or even quite chaotic sentences. Speech is made up of utterances but utterances seldom correspond to sentences.

Thus, it is more preferable to describe a sentence than to define it. The main peculiar features of the sentence are: integrity, syntactic independence, grammatical completeness, semantic completeness, communicative completeness, communicative functioning, predicativity, modality, intonational completeness

M. Blokh: The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose.

Classification of sentences
1. According to structural features: simple and composite; two-member and one- member sentences. Elliptical and one-member sentences:
e.g. Marvelous! Horrible! How very interesting!
e.g. No birds singing at the dawn (Strong resemblance to 2 member sentences).
e.g. I saw him there. Yesterday (parselation).
2. According to the purpose of the utterance: declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory, ? optative.

Predicativity is a syntactical category. It is actualized reference to reality. Predicativity consists in ascribing an action, state or quality from the predicate to the subject. It is expressed through the interrelation between two principal parts of the sentence the subject and the predicate (formally through their agreement in person and number + tense characteristics, refers an action to a definite period of time).