II. DEFINITION OF THE SENTENCE

A satisfactory definition of the sentence is very difficult to give. Many definitions have been suggested by grammarians but it is very unlikely that there will ever be a ‘best’ definition that will satisfy everybody. It is difficult to draw the line between what constitutes a sentence and what doesn’t. The study of grammar has always focused on the sentence as the maximal unit of analysis, the tip of the pyramid of the hierarchy of linguistic units.

The traditional definition of a sentence as a “complete thought” goes back to the ancient Indian and Greek grammarians. The structuralists adopted a very rough and dubious definition: a sentence was defined as a stretch of speech between major pauses. For the transformational-generative grammarians no definition was necessary because, according to them, parts of speech and sentences were recognized intuitively. They also stated that the whole syntactic theory constituted a definition of the sentence. This approach also has its shortcomings because native speakers’ intuitions about whether particular word strings are sentences often disagree.

At least four basic types of definition of the sentence can be outlined: logical, psychological, structural / or grammatical/, and phonetic. Of course, there are a lot of mixed types of definition.

1. A traditional, logical definition of the sentence reads as follows: “A sentence is a word or a group of words capable of expressing a complete thought or meaning” / Henry Sweet/.
2. Psychological definitions, which were current in the last quarter of the 19th century, assumed that the sentence is an expression of processes of combination of notions or notion-groups in the inner world of the speaker, and the means of reproducing the same combinations of notions in the inner world of the listener.
3. The definition of structural linguists, given earlier / the sentence is a stretch of speech between major pauses/ is based on phonetic and structural criteria.
4. A more exhaustive definition is achieved when combining the psychological, logical and grammatical approach. From this point of view a sentence is a unit of speech which is perceived by the speaker and the listener as a grammatical whole and expressing a complete unit of thought. Notions are the psychological bases of thinking. Notions combine in the sentence in an act of thinking, which conveys a message. Notions combine on the basis of a predicative relation. The predicative bond is a binary relation of dependence where one member / the predicate/ characterizes the other member / the subject/.

From the logical point of view the sentence is a reflection of reality. It relates to a situation in reality. The sentence reflects reality through a statement.