Lecture 9. Simple Sentence. General notes. Informative perspective of the sentence
SRS – class. Valency
The sentence is
1. a nominative unit of language: it names referential event or situation.
2. a communicative unit: it communicates and asks information, affirms and denies a state of affaires. On this principle there can be cited declarative, imperative, interrogative and other sentences.
3. a predicative unit of language: it has modal and temporal characteristics. It refers to the objective reality: it presents participants of the situation, shows the time of the event, its being real or unreal, desirable or undesirable, necessary or unnecessary, etc., e. g., Mary is at home, Mary might be at home, Mary might have been at home, I wish Mary were at home, Mary must be at home, etc. Predication is actualization of the event on the mental and linguistic level. It can be conveyed by finite forms of the verb. Modality is the way the event is represented be the speaker: real or unreal, desirable or undesirable, and other subjective evaluations. It can be rendered by the verb, modal words, functional words, intonation, and the word order.
4. The sentence can be one word and more structured, e.g., Night. Predication is expressed by intonation and emphasized by a full stop (night is a nominative unit of the vocabulary). So, it has a grammatical form.
5. The sentence is not a ready - made unit: it is created in the course of communication. However, it is created according the pattern constructions proper to the language. So, the sentence is a unit of language. The unit created in the course of communication is termed the utterance, a unit of speech.
6. The sentence is a cognitive unit: it expresses the speakers’ thought.
7. Traditionally three aspects of sentence are singled out: grammatical, semantic and pragmatic ones.
There are several terms to denote the starting point of a sentence and the new information making up a statement. The German scholar H. Paul identified them as “psychological subject” and ‘psychological predicate’; A. Smirnitsky – ‘lexical subject’ and ‘lexical predicate’. Czech linguists who studied the issue with reference to the English language used the terms ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ from Greek. They turned out more convenient for being related not to the lexical or morphological side of the language but to the syntactic and semantic structure of it. The linguists such as D.E. Johnson, D.M. Perlmutter, P.M. Postal, E.L. Keenan, B. Comrie, A. Timberlake, Ch. N. Li, S. A. Tompson, U. Chafe, R. Van Valin, U. Foley, Ch. Fillmore used their own terms to denote almost the same notions: subject-predicate, topic-comment, given information-new information, old information-new information, semantic roles – agent-patient, referential relations, etc. The theme is the information – a part of a sentence about which a statement is made – the rheme. In a text one sentence can be a theme, the other – a rheme, so there may be more than one theme and rheme. They can have any syntactical positions: subject or predicate.
The English language being of a strict word order can have a specific way to express what is said, known before and what is being uttered now, the way different from other languages. Besides, other means can express the same idea: articles (A man came, There is a man; The man is here), pronouns (That laughter – how well he knew it!), prepositional phrases (As for the others, great numbers of them moved past slowly), intonation, constructions with intensifiers, contrastive meaning, different determiners. Chafe noticed the pragmatic perspective of the word order: an utterance, its arrangement is characterized by a specific view of the speaker, his/her giving importance to a part of a sentence (term - point of view of a speaker).