Thanks--this info is very interesting! (I have a stack of papers waiting to be graded right now, so of course I am checking through all my email. What a delight to find such a rewarding message. I'm going to try to track down Michaels' book now.)
Beth
>>> "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> 10/08/09 5:21 PM >>>
Hey folks -
Weeks ago, we had an exchange on the definition of a sentence as "a
complete thought," and Beth asked if anyone had ever mentioned a source
for that definition. I thought I remembered a good discussion of it
somewhere, but I couldn't recall exactly where. But now, I'm *supposed*
to be working on program review documents (complete with mission
statements), so of course I've suddenly remembered the reference I was
looking for (and have thus provided perhaps the only extant example of a
mission statement accomplishing anything useful).
It's Ian Michaels's excellent _English Grammatical Categories_ (it
focuses on English, as the title suggests, but he gives a detailed
historical background dealing with the grammatical traditions that
Renaissance England inherited). I'm doubtless oversimplifying the
description Michaels provides (pp. 38-42), but in general the idea that
"a sentence expresses a complete thought" appears to be one
interpretation of a statement made by Dionysius Thrax, a Greek
grammarian who died around 90 b.c.e. The idea was picked up by Priscian,
a sixth-century Latin grammarian whose text was one of the core books
used throughout the middle ages in Church schools (and in Europe, those
were the only kind, really). With Thrax and even Priscian, though,
"complete" can be construed as referring to whether a group of words
accomplishes the speaker's purpose, rather than whether it conforms to
the more grammatically-based notion assumed in the modern definition of
sentence. Medieval and Renaissance grammarians used several terms for
groups of words - 'oratio,' 'sententia' -but none of these conformed
strictly to those constructions that we'd call sentences, and no others.
In some cases, 'sententia' could be roughly equivalent to 'statement'.
I'll venture a conjecture, which should not be taken as reflecting the
views of Michaels (he doesn't discuss developments post-1800): We
developed a specialized sense of "the sentence" that both shaped and was
shaped by punctuation patterns, and was keyed to the idea of a sentence
being a full statement (a subordinate clause, by itself, has no truth
value). But we kept using a translation of Priscian's definition
because....that had "always" been the definition (sorry, Brad). And
under one interpretation of Priscian's definition, intentional fragments
would be sentences.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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