David, I've never been much of a notionalist (am I making up this word?).
I prefer to see myself as a pragmatist: if it allows students to
understand, use it, whether it comes from Chomsky, Pike, Lamb, Halliday, or
Curme.  Or even Dionysius Thrax.

At any rate, I'd define a sentence as a stretch of written discourse that
begins with a capital letter and ends with a period.  Sentence has always
been a questionable term.  It was originally a period, a stretch of
discourse that ends with a punctuation mark that came to take its name.  It
was always a rhetorical stretch (No pun intended.  Well, maybe a little pun
intended).  I guess this is all to say that I don't think you'll ever
successfully define a sentence.

But a clause. Now,  that's got grammatical limits.  Or, if you want a
greater possiblity, go for a T-unit.  When you've got subjects and
predicates to discern, you can come close to putting definable limits on
stretches of discourse.  Kelly Hunt discovered that no one had defined or
could define a sentence successfully.  That's why he measured clauses and
T-units.  As a graduate student, I worked for Kelly counting T-units.  And
I can tell you from experience that even T-units are blasted hard to
discern sometimes.  Though not nearly so difficult as sentences.

Ed is clearly right about what you might be able to teach to students.
Notional ideas are tough to get across.  And why would you want to anyway?
The idea of a sentence is only an issue in writing.  It's in part a visual
issue.  It offends some people if you start with a capital and end with a
period a stretch of discourse that doesn't have a finite verb and/or a
subject.  Though good writers do that all the time. All the time. And not
just to answer questions.

I think what you want to teach students is how to craft written texts.  And
how to see craft in the writing of others.  It seems to me that learning
about certain kinds of constituents helps.  It gives you some vocabulary
and a conscious knowledge to discern that the last three "sentences" of the
previous paragraph aren't. Sentences, that is.

I'm not sure I helped you, David.  But I'm not sure anyone can help you
define a sentence. Not with a definition that will hold up very long.  Not
evern Aristotle.  Max

*************************
Max Morenberg, Professor
English Department
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056




>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>              <[log in to unmask]>
>Poster:       David D Mulroy <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      What is a sentence?
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Hello, everyone.  The list has been quiet lately.  I had an exchange with
>Ed Vavra that I thought was interesting.  It concerned defining the
>sentence.  I would really appreciate a sampling of your views.  My idea is
>based on Aristotle, who connects sentences with the notions of truth and
>falsity in his essay, On Interpretation, without offering a complete
>definition of a sentence.  What I proposed to Ed was that a declarative
>sentence is an utterance that has the formal qualities of utterances that
>can be classified as true or false.  I don't mean that every sentence can
>itself be classified as true or false, since it is easy to come up with
>counterexamples, e.g., "This sentence is false."  What I am
>saying is that every declarative sentence has formal qualities that can be
>realized in such a way as to produce true or false statements.  Formally,
><"this sentence is false"> consists of a noun phrase, a linking verb, and
>an adjective.  Obviously, that format can make any number of true or false
>statements, e.g., "This patient is dead." Is it true that every
>correctly formed declarative sentence has such a format, one that is
>at least potentially productive of true or false statements,
>while no non-sentence does?
>
>I would think that questions or commands could be explained as variations
>or transformations of declarative sentences.  I don't think that
>elliptical sentences like <"In the refrigerator."> as an answer to a
>question like <"Where is the cheese?"> are really a problem, since no one
>would suggest that <in the refrigerator> is a correctly formed sentence
>all by itself.
>
>Ed seemed to accept this definition but had misgivings about its use in
>teaching grammar to younger students.
>
>I would be most interested in your thoughts.  I hope that everyone's
>semester is off to a good start!
>
>David