In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request, command or suggestion.[1]
A sentence can also be defined in orthographic terms alone, i.e. as simply that which is contained between a capital letter and a full stop.[2] This is arguably more accurate than definitions which conflate orthography and grammar, given the variety of structures which are possible between the capital letter and a full stop. For instance, the opening of Charles Dickens' well known novel, Bleak House, begins with the following three sentences:
The first sentence involves one single word, a proper noun. The second sentence has only a non-finite verb. The third is a single nominal group. Only an orthographic definition can hope to encompass this variation.
As with all language expressions, sentences may contain both function and content words, and contain properties distinct to natural language, such as characteristic intonation and timing patterns.
Sentences are generally characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb, e.g. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
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A clause typically contains at least a subject noun phrase and a finite verb. While the subject is usually a noun phrase, other kinds of phrases (such as gerund phrases) work as well, and some languages allow subjects to be omitted. There are two types of clauses: independent and subordinate (dependent). An independent clause demonstrates a complete thought; it is a complete sentence: for example, I am sad. A subordinate clause is not a complete sentence: for example, because I have no friends. See also copula for the consequences of the verb to be on the theory of sentence structure.
A simple complete sentence consists of a single clause. Other complete sentences consist of two or more clauses (see below).
One traditional scheme for classifying English sentences is by the number and types of finite clauses:
Sentences can also be classified based on their purpose:
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate. For example: "I have a ball." In this sentence one can change the persons: "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence. It does not contain a finite verb. For example, "Mary!" "Yes." "Coffee." etc. Other examples of minor sentences are headings (e.g. the heading of this entry), stereotyped expressions ("Hello!"), emotional expressions ("Wow!"), proverbs, etc. This can also include nominal sentences like "The more, the merrier". These do not contain verbs in order to intensify the meaning around the nouns and are normally found in poetry and catchphrases.[3]
Sentences that comprise a single word are called word sentences, and the words themselves sentence words.[4]
This section looks into the definition, history and analysis of the length of a sentence.
After a slump of interest, a new fascination with sentence length came to the foreground in the 1980s, but mostly "with respect to other syntactic phenomena".[5]
By some definitions, the average size length of a sentence is given by "no. of words / no. of sentences". [6] The textbook Mathematical linguistics, written by András Kornaiin suggests that in "journalistic prose the median sentence length is above 15 words".[7] The average length of a sentence generally serves as a measure of sentence difficulty [8] or complexity. The general trend is that as the average sentence length increases, the complexity of the sentences also increases.[9]
In some circumstances "sentence length" is expressed by the number of clauses, while the "clause length" is expressed by the number of phones.[10]
D. L. Olmsted points out that the length of a sentence, even without any testing, can arbitrarily reach a maximum, because "[every] sentence [has a] length of less than a million words".[11]
One twitter writer acknowledged the fact that internet media lend themselves to shorter, more fragmented sentences by saying, "translating Cicero and such, I've found that the greatest speakers of history have sentence lengths that make our present day structure seem juvenile."[12] A test done by Erik Schils and Pieter de Haan (by sampling five texts) showed that any two adjacent sentences are more likely to have similar lengths, and almost certainly have similar length when from a text in the fiction genre. This countered the theory that "authors may aim at an alternation of long and short sentence".[13] Sentence length, as well as word difficulty, are both factors in the readability of a sentence. [14] However, other factors such as the presence of conjunctions, have been said to "facilitate comprehension considerably". [15]
ctively).