The study of the sentence and phrase. Their general properties and functions

The sentence is a group of words which expresses predication and is used for the purpose of communication. Predicative connection of the subject and predicate makes up the backbone of any complete sentence in English. A sentence can consist of only one word, as any lingual unit of the upper level can consist of only one unit of the lower level, 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 phrase is a group of words which does not express predication and is used for the purpose of nomination. (Ex.: The government recruited – a completed sentence; The government recruiting – a part of a sentence).

The notions of predication and modality.The definition of the category of predication is similar to the definition of the category of modality, which also shows a connection between the named objects and actual reality. However, modality is a broader category, revealed not only in grammar, but in the lexical elements of language; for example, various modal meanings are expressed by modal verbs (can, may, must, etc.), by word-particles of specifying modal semantics (just, even, would be, etc.), by semi-functional modal words and phrases of subjective evaluation (perhaps, unfortunately, by all means, etc.) and by other lexical units. Predication can be defined as syntactic modality, expressed by the sentence.

Classification of sentences according to their structure (simple, complex, compound sentences), semi-composite sentences. The sentence can be classified according to the structure into simple composite and semi-composite sentence. Simple sentences are mono-predicative units. It means that their structure have one subject and one predicate. (Ex.: Jack and Mike liked Mary. – semi-composite)They may be extended or non-extended that is why they may or may not have optional parts expressed in them. Obligatory parts of a sentence complement its structure without extending it. (Ex.: Mrs.Burns looked at Myryam. – non-extended obligatory part/ Mrs.Burns looked nervously at Myryam. – extended part). In simple sentences scholars observe 1-member and 2-member sentences. In 2-member sentences the subject and predicate are both present, in 1-member sentence one of them is missing. (Ex.: Strange how different she’s become. – 1-member sentence). The compound sentence is a predicative unit in which all the parts are semantically equal ti each other. Compound sentences are easily transformed into narratives. Clauses in compound sentences are connected by means of coordinate conjuctions ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘for’, ‘or’, ‘either or’; conjunctive adverbs ‘thus’, ‘so’, ‘yet’, ‘then’, ‘consequently’, ‘nevertheless’. (Ex.: Neither of us was having any luck nevertheless we kept trying.) The complex sentenceis a poly-predicative unit which has a principal clause and one or more subordinate clauses. Sometimes subordinate clauses may function as principal ones in which case we speak of several degrees of subordination. Functionally each type of a clause is equal to a part of a sentence. Thus subject clauses perform the function of the subject. Some scholars treat subject predicative and object clauses under the term nominal clauses because they can easily replace one another expressing the same idea. The principal clause is restricted to the link-verb ‘be’. This happens when subject and predicative clauses are expressed in the same complex sentence. What is left must be the principal clause. The semi-composite sentence is a sentence, the predicative lines in which are expressed in fusion. The semi-composed sentence is similar to a simple one in the way that it has one full predication expressed by a finite verb. At the same time it bears a strong resemblance to a composite sentence because in its structure we find 2 predicative lines, one of which is expressed by a finite verb and the other is expressed by a construction with a non-finite verb. (Ex.: Mary smiled and came to me. / The moon rose red. – double semantic predicate / I make notes in my diary of the things that I should mend or replace. – semi-complex, attribute).

The notion of an elementary sentence and its transforms. It is a sentence in which all the positions are obligatory; in other words, an “elementary sentence” includes, besides the principal parts, only complementive modifiers.The elementary sentence coincides structurally with the so-called unexpandedsimple sentence, a monopredicative sentence, which includes only obligatory nominative parts. The expanded simple sentence includes also some optional parts, i.e. supplementive modifiers, which do not violate the syntactic status of the simple sentence, i.e. do not make it into a composite or semi-composite sentence. For example, the sentence ‘He gave me the book’ is unexpanded, because all the nominative parts of this sentence are required by the obligatory valency of the verb to give; cf.: *He gave…; He gave me… - these constructions would be semantically and structurally deficient. The sentence ‘He gave me a very interesting book’ is expanded, because it includes an expansion, the attribute-supplement very interesting; the second sentence is reducible to the elementary unexpanded sentence built on the syntagmatic pattern of the bicomplementive verb to give.