Talk:Sentence (linguistics)

Who's in Charge Here?

I'd venture to say that 99.99% of English-speaking people would never answer the above question with "I". In this case, if one were to use a single word to reference one's self, that word would be "me". It may not fit neatly into some linguistic theories, but it's the correct word by convention. Little things like that bug me ;) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.56.24.188 (talk • contribs) .

I'd venture to say 35-75% of the population would say "I am." At least, that'd feel more natural to me. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 130.58.241.222 (talk • contribs) .

A more global view might be warranted

Shouldn't this article take a more global view of the sentence.... not just the strict linguistic one? At the moment it discusses legal and correct sentences without making it clear that this is only meaningful in some contexts. In popular usage the definition of sentence is a little bit more lax. fabiform | talk 20:32, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

I dont think you quite get the concept of an internal grammar. Linguistics is all about description and not prescription. What to you may seem superficially like a "lax" sentence, is just a sentence like any other, and follows underlying patterns of what makes a sentence a sentence based on universal language principals. This article does not at all provide the recipe for a correct sentence, rather it outlines basic components. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.23.229.120 (talk) 00:52, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Another definition of sentence.

I'm of the opinion that a sentence is a group of words that communicates a complete idea.

I believe a sentence must have a subject and a predicate.

The shortest sentence in the bible is "Jesus wept."

I don't think "Go!" is a sentence, as it is incomplete. Sure we use it in speech and in text, but I still don't think it is definitevly a sentence. Go where?

The same applies for "No." No what?

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 147.66.131.10 (talk • contribs) .

"Die!" —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kdammers (talk • contribs).

Sentence definition

I think it is important to understand that a "sentence" is a graphological convention; that is, the sentence came into being and developed as writing systems came into being and developed. The term 'sentence' is probably best reserved to label stretches of written text. See Halliday and Matthiessen, An Introduction to Functional Grammar and Geoff Thompson, Introducing Functional Grammar.

--Jim 20:19, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the current definition for 'sentence' is completely bogus. WinterSpw (talk) 18:24, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Bad example "The more, the merrier"

The more, the merrier is just a shorthand. The full expanded sentence would be regular compound sentence using the verb 'to be' twice, right? :

The more [persons there are], the merrier [the situtation/event will be].

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 198.185.18.207 (talk • contribs) .

It's certainly not a regular compound sentence. You could argue that it's a regular complex sentence, with "the more [people there are]" serving as a adverb clause modifying "the merrier [the situation/event will be]", but I think this is missing the point, which is that the verb is implied; the sentence itself ("the more, the merrier") has no verbs. It's true that some more-normal structure can be imposed by taking fuller clauses to be elided, but the primary structure is one of parallel phrases, the implication being that two things go together. Similarly with many such adages: "in for a penny, in for a pound"; "like father, like son"; "no pain, no gain"; "out of sight, out of mind"; "once bitten, twice shy"; "waste not, want not"; and so on. (Well, that last one does have verbs, but I still think the true structure is one of parallel phrases rather than one of coordinated or subordinated clauses.) Ruakh 19:28, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Article title

Shouldn't the title be Sentence (syntax)? --Stefán Örvarr Sigmundsson (talk) 13:59, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Do sentence fragments end in periods?

According to proper grammar, do sentence fragments end in periods? Do independent clauses end in periods? WinterSpw (talk) 18:28, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Good questions. Sentence fragment redirects here, yet "fragment" is not used in the article. --Jtir (talk) 20:40, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

When the concept of sentence appeared first? Who is the discoverer/inventor?

Also, do the sentences appear in all natural languages?--MathFacts (talk) 14:49, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Sentence fragment

Redirects here, but it's not even mentioned here. One can easily find example pages like [1] Is there a more formal definition? Tijfo098 (talk) 04:48, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

The term does appear in more formal works, e.g. [2] [3] The latter has an interesting empirical observation, which may be worth mentioning here. Following up on that, it looks like sentence fragments are important in probabilistic linguistics [4] and computational linguistics [5] Tijfo098 (talk) 05:03, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Apparently there is a thing called sentence-fragment test, which distinguishes a sentence fragment from gibberish [6] [7] (2nd ref assumes the transformational grammar framework) Tijfo098 (talk) 05:06, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Declarative sentence definition

When I look at a statement as being that what is made by use of a (meaningful) declarative sentence and is truth-bearing, the current definition of a declarative sentence seems pretty bad.

In the example "I am going home." we cannot say that this sentence makes a statement. According to Peter Strawson, the sentence itself cannot be truth-bearing, and only the use of a sentence can make a statement. The statement that can be made by the above sentence depends on the utterance of that sentence, not on the sentence itself. The sentence itself can be seen as merely a linguistic "tool" to make the statement. As such, I think the formulation "A declarative sentence ... makes a statement" is incorrect. This, of course, depends on how the term statement is defined.

Thoughts on this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kyouran Asuka (talk • contribs) 20:37, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

English only?

This article appears to only be about sentences in English, it would be helpful if it were expanded by a knowledgeable person to include other languages (if they have sentences, and to say so if they don't). Or at least we should point out that it is only about English sentences. 110.33.96.186 (talk) 15:01, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Commas

Does anyone else think that comma usage in the first two paragraphs is exceptionally poor? Shouldn't articles on grammar and linguistics be held to a higher literary standard? I don't like to criticize grammar since mine is far from perfect, but we wouldn't want people to start questioning the authority of the source.

Bradweir (talk) 22:31, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Merged after AfD

I copied the entire content into the "Analysis of sentence length" section, renaming it "Sentence length", changing the words "this article" to "this section", and indenting the headings by one layer. I copied the external links, in their original malformed form, into the External links section. PamD 18:10, 20 December 2011 (UTC)