As a few others have noted, "thought" is way to broad a term to name 
much of anything about a sentence. "Complete thought" is not any 
better.

It would be better to say that a _clause_ (or an independent clause) 
expresses a proposition, as Bruce notes. A proposition in logic is a 
statement that predicates something of an entity: "The sky is blue" 
predicates, or attributes, blueness to the sky. The logical formula is 
f(x), meaning "f is predicated of x".

It might look like this corresponds closely to the subject/predicate 
division in grammar, but it doesn't, once you move on from linking-verb 
sentence patterns. But when you get to transitive and other kinds of 
verbs, it doesn't line up so well:

eat(child, cupcake) would be the formula for "The child is eating a 
cupcake."

I think I have this right.

Ed also raises the question of what looks like propositions inside of 
propositions:

"He lives in a green house."


Noun phrases with adjectives can be viewed as compressions of 
propositions, as can nominalized clauses such as the subject of

_The corporation's outsourcing of customer service calls_ has led to 
complaints.

There was once a theory of syntax that proposed that, indeed, even noun 
phrases with adjectival modifiers were derived from "deep" clauses; the 
theory was called generative semantics. As you can imagine, the 
derivation of quite ordinary sentences grew quite cumbersome.

In any case, the logical-proposition idea is a good one, because it 
shows the crucial role of the main verb. It is the verb that determines 
the sentence pattern (linking, transitive, and so on).

People concerned with correctness want sentences to "express a complete 
thought". A much better criteria for valid sentencehood (that is, the 
quality of being able to "stand alone") are (a) presence of a finite 
(present- or past-marked) verb and (b) the item is not a modifier or 
complement in a larger sentence (e.g., a relative [adjective] or adverb 
clause).

For relatively short sentences, there are two pretty good tests.
(1) Can the sentence appear in the blank in the following?
"I am convinced that  ____."
(2) Can you add a tag to the sentence?
"The hurricane wrought devastation across large areas of the Gulf 
coast, _didn't it_?"


Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba


Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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