John wrote a letter. NVN — SPO John had a snack. NVN — SP
The semantic structure of the sentence is a reflection of a certain situation or event which includes a process as its dynamic centre, the doer and the objects of the process and certain circumstances and conditions of its realization.
The semantic structure of the sentence is often called deep structure, the syntactic structure is called surface structure. There is no direct correspondence between deep and surface structure:
John opened the door. NVN (SPO) — doer (agent), action, object. The key opened the door. NVN (SPO) — instrument, action, object. These two aspects characterize the sentence as a unit of language. Logico-communicative aspect characterizes the sentence as a unit of speech, or utterance. The sentence as a unit of communication usually consists of two parts: the topic for discussion, i.e. something, about which a statement is made, and the information about the topic, or the statement itself.
This division into two parts, the theme and the rheme, is called the actual sentence division, or the functional sentence perspective.
There is one more aspect of the sentence as a unit of speech — the use of sentences in social interaction, their function in particular contexts of use. For example, the statementI I have no cigarettes can be interpreted in certain contexts as a command or request. So sentences can be analysed from the point of view of the intentions of the speaker, the effect of the utterance on the interlocuter, the appropriateness of the utterance in a given context. This aspect is called pragmatic.
Different aspects of the sentence are reflected in numerous definitions, which may be logical, psychological, structural etc. It is difficult to give an all-embracing definition (see, for example, M.Y.Blokh).
2. The communicative function of the sentence distinguishes it from phrases and words, which have one function — naming. Compare the following structures:
(1) The doctor's arrival.
(2) The doctor arrived.
These two structures name the same event, but (1) is not correlated with the situation of speech and does not convey information about the reality or the time of the event; (2) is correlated with the situation of speech and shows that the event took place in the past.
The correlation of the thought expressed in the sentence with the situation of speech is called predicativity. Predicativiry has three main components: modality, time and person, expressed by the categories of mood, tense and person. So the predicate verb is the main means of expressing predicativity.
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The person component of predicativity is also expressed by the subject. Thus predicativity is expressed by the subject-predicate group, or predication. Predication constitutes the basic structure of the sentence.
Predicativity is also expressed by intonation, which is the essential feature of the sentence as a unit of speech.
It should be noted, that some scholars use only one term — predication to denote both the relation of the sentence to reality and means of its expression.
A sentence may contain primary and secondary predication:
/ heard someone singing.
The group someone singing is called the secondary predication, as it resembles the subject-predicate group, or the primary predication, structurally and semantically: it consists of two main components, nominal and verbal, and names an event or situation. But it cannot be correlated with reality directly and cannot constitute an independent unit of communication, as verbals have no categories of mood, tense and person. The secondary predication is related to the situation of speech indirectly, through the primary predications.
3. As is well-known, sentences may be classified on the basis of two main principles: communicative (declarative, iterrogative, imperative, exclamatory) and structural (simple amd composite, one-member and two-member, complete and elliptical).
In the language system certain sentence-patterns arc correlated and are connected by oppositional relations: statement/question (He knows it — Does
he know it?), non-negative/negative structures (Does he know il? — Doesn't he know it?), non-emphatic/emphatic structures (Come! — DO come.').
Syntactic oppositions reveal syntactic categories (their number varies with different scholars). Members of syntactic oppositions can be regarded as grammatical modifications, or valiants of sentence patterns. Thus the syntactic structure of the sentence may be represented by a number of forms, which constitute the paradigm of the sentence.
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