Once we successfully define "sentence," we can take on the harder task of
defining "word."

Dick Veit



On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 5:14 PM, Spruiell, William C <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

>  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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