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sentence

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Definition:

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:

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)

Pronunciation: SEN-tens

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