Simple sentences and propositions
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P52-C4
2025-12-12
46
Simple sentences and propositions
English teachers frequently remind their students that “each sentence must express a complete thought.” In saying this, they are warning their students not to write “sentence fragments,” i.e. sentences which are lacking some essential element.
We will begin to consider the question of what the essential elements of a sentence are and how they fit together. But first we might ask ourselves what kind of “complete thought” a sentence may express. For the moment we will only consider the simplest, or most basic, kind of sentence, namely DECLARATIVE sentences. Declarative sentences are typically used to make statements. A speaker uses a statement to assert or deny a PROPOSITION, i.e. a claim which can, at least in principle, be determined to be either true or false. Other kinds of sentences, which we will discuss further in later topics, are typically used to perform other kinds of speech acts: giving commands, asking questions, offering wishes, blessings, curses, etc. Sentences of these kinds cannot be said to be either true or false.
A statement, then, is a sentence which asserts a proposition, i.e. a claim that a certain state of affairs does or does not exist. Normally statements are made about something or someone; they claim that a certain state of affairs is true of a given individual or set of individuals (where the individual may be a person, place, thing, etc.). They may indicate that a certain individual has a particular property, as in (5a, b), or that a certain relationship holds between two or more individuals, as in (5c, d):
(5) a John is hungry.
b Mary snores.
c John loves Mary.
d Maryis slapping John.
The element of meaning which identifies the property or relationship is called the PREDICATE: the words hungry, snores, loves, and is slapping express the predicates in the above examples. The individuals (or participants) of whom the property or relationship is claimed to be true (John and Mary in these examples) are called ARGUMENTS. The grammatical unit which expresses a single predicate and its arguments is called a simple sentence, or CLAUSE.
As we can already see from example (5), different predicates require different numbers of arguments: hungry and snores require just one, loves and slapping require two. Some predicates may not require any arguments at all. For example, in many languages comments about the weather (e.g. It is raining, or It is dark, or It is hot) could be expressed by a single word, a bare predicate with no arguments.
When a predicate is asserted to be true of the right number of arguments, the result is a well-formed proposition: a “complete thought.”
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