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Sunday, July 1, 2018

What is a sentence?

 

Photo source: toppr.com

 

What is a sentence? Here is my definition:

 

A sentence is an unified segment of words that has at least one subject-predicate pair and follows grammatical rules

 

The subject of a sentence is the piece of reality that is selected, while the predicate describes that piece. For example, in the sentence 'John ran to the store', 'John' is the subject and 'ran to the store' is the predicate. Some sentences have multiple subject-predicate pairs such as, 'John ran to the store but the store was closed'.

 

Some sentences have an implied subject or predicate. For example, in the sentence 'Pay your taxes', the subject 'you' is implied and part of the predicate, 'should' is also implied.

 

I believe that the only syntactic rule common to all languages is the subject-predicate pair. When comparing languages from around the world, you will not find a uniform consistency in the way words are ordered. The only syntactic consistency you will find is the subject-predicate pair.

 

 

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