IV. ADDITIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SENTENCES

1. THE SENTENCE IS UNIQUE AMONG LINGUISTIC UNITS

The sentence is unique among other linguistic units: unlike words and phrases sentences don't exist as prefabricated units (the sentence doesn’t exist in the system of language as a ready-made unit); there is no 'vocabulary list of sentences', sentences are created every time a new in the act of communication following certain sentence patterns. Therefore the sentence, unlike the word, is not a unit of language proper; it is a chunk of text built up as a result of speech-making process, out of different units of language, first of all words, which are the immediate constituents of contextually bound sentences.

2. SENTENCE VS. UTTERANCE

Distinction is made in transformational grammar between competence /the knowledge of how to produce sentences/ and performance /the act of producing them/. Consequently two terms are used to embrace the nature of the sentence: “sentence” and “utterance”. Sentence is an abstract notion, while utterance is a term relating to the world of behavior or performance. It can be said that utterances are performances of sentences.

3. SEMANTIC, STRUCTURAL AND PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF THE SENTENCE

Sentences are pairings of meaning and form, hence sentences have a semantic /meaning/ and a structural /grammatical/ aspect. In some cases the same meaning can be expressed with different structures,

 E.g.: Jack owns that car. That car belongs to Jack.

In other cases the same structure may express different meanings,

E.g.: Flying planes can be dangerous. The shooting of the hunters was horrible.

The theory of the functional sentence perspective, developed originally by the Prague School of linguistics, has introduced another aspect to the analysis of the sentence – the pragmatic aspect. Pragmatics is closely related to the communicative function of the sentence and deals, among others, with the distinction between “theme” and “ rheme”. Theme is the old, known information, the starting point for the utterance.

The rheme conveys the new information, for whose sake the sentence has been uttered or written. Thus the following sentences convey roughly the same meaning: John developed a plan. The plan was developed by John. However, from a pragmatic viewpoint they are different since the first one takes the doer /John/ as the starting point of the utterance, while the second one takes the object /the plan/ as its starting point. Accordingly, the rhematic focus in these sentences is different.