Sentence word

Sentence words (also called word sentences) are single words that form a full sentence, such as "Alas." and "Yes." and "No.". Henry Sweet described them as "a variety of words which have the peculiarity of always forming a sentence by themselves". The Dutch linguist J. M. Hoogvliet calls them "volzinwoorden". They were also noted in 1891 by Georg von der Gabelentz, whose observations were extensively elaborated by Hoogvliet in 1903. Wegener called them "Wortsätze".[1][2]

Sweet gives sentences such as "Come!", "John!", "Alas!" as examples of sentence words, in addition to "Yes." and "No.". Gabelentz does not list "Yes." and "No." as sentence words, however.[3][2]

Many sentence words have formed from a process of devaluation and semantic erosion. Various phrases in various languages have devolved into the words for "yes" and "no" (which can be found discussed in detail in yes and no), and these include expletive sentence words such as "Well!" and the French "Ben!" (a parallel to "Bien!").[4]

However, not all word sentences suffer from this loss of lexical meaning. A subset of sentence words, which Fonagy calls "nominal phrases", exist that retain their lexical meaning. These exist in Uralic languages, and are the remainders of an archaic syntax wherein there were no explicit markers for nouns and verbs. An example of this is the Hungarian language "Fecske!", which transliterates as "Swallow!", but which has to be idiomatically translated with multiple words "Look! A swallow!" for rendering the proper meaning of the original, which to a native Hungarian speaker is neither elliptical nor emphatic, in English. Such nominal phrase word sentences occur in English as well, particularly in telegraphese or as the rôte questions that are posed to fill in form data (e.g. "Name?", "Age?").[4]

Modern Hebrew exhibits some sentence words too, e.g. ".חַם" (/χam/) = "It is hot." or ".קַר" (/kar/) = "It is cold.".

Literature

Jan Noordegraaf, ‘Gabelentz en Hoogvliet over partikels’, in: Van Hemsterhuis tot Stutterheim. Over wetenschapsgeschiedenis by Jan Noordegraaf. Münster: Nodus Publikationen 2000, 198-201. http://hdl.handle.net/1871/15748

References

  1. ^ Jan Noordegraaf (2001). "J. M. Hoogvliet as a teacher and theoretician". In Marcel Bax, C. Jan-Wouter Zwart, and A. J. van Essen. Reflections on Language and Language Learning. John Benjamins B.V.. pp. 24. ISBN 9027225842. 
  2. ^ a b Giorgio Graffi (2001). 200 Years of Syntax. John Benjamins B.V.. pp. 121. ISBN 1588110524. 
  3. ^ Henry Sweet (1900). "Adverbs". A New English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 127. ISBN 1402153759. 
  4. ^ a b Ivan Fonagy (2001). Languages Within Language. John Benjamins B.V.. pp. 66. ISBN 0927232820.