The largest independent unit of grammar: it begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. The sentence is traditionally (and inadequately) defined as a word or group of words that expresses a complete idea and that includes a subject and a verb. See also:
- Basic Sentence Structures
- Simple Sentence
- Compound Sentence
- Complex Sentence
- Compound-Complex Sentence
- Cumulative Sentence
- Existential Sentence
- Fused Sentence
- Loose Sentence
- Periodic Sentence
- Topic Sentence
- Verbless Sentence
- Mood, Voice, Polarity
- Introduction to Sentence Combining
Etymology:
From the Latin, "to feel"Types of Sentences:
- Declarative Sentence
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
(Mark Twain) - Interrogative Sentence
"But what is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read."
(Oscar Wilde) - Imperative Sentence
"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
(Mark Twain) - Exclamatory Sentence
"To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!
(H. L. Mencken)
Observations:
"Traditional attempts to define the sentence were generally either psychological or logical-analytic in nature: the former type spoke of 'a complete thought' or some other inaccessible psychological phenomenon; the latter type, following Aristotle, expected to find every sentence made up of a logical subject and logical predicate, units that themselves rely on the sentence for their definition. A more fruitful approach is that of Jespersen (1924: 307), who suggests testing the completeness and independence of a sentence, by assessing its potential for standing alone, as a complete utterance."
(D. J. Allerton. Essentials of Grammatical Theory. Routledge, 1979)
