Linguistic Sentence

A linguistic sentence is a linguistic item that can be generated by a natural language syntax.

• AKA: NL Sentence.
• Context:
  • It can (typically) have a Sentence Subject.
  • It can (typically) have a Predicate Phrase (with a verb and a sentence object).
  • It can (often) be a part of a Linguistic Passage.
  • It can (often) be intended to have one or more Linguistic Sentence Messages (ideas) (Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 2000).
  • It can have a Sentence Implication (on a linguistic agent that received the sentence).
  • It can range from (typically) being a Grammatical Sentence to being an Ungrammatical Sentence, based on its conformance to a natural language syntax (Chomsky, 1957).
  • It can range from being an Abstract Linguistic Sentence to being a Linguistic Sentence Instance.
  • It can range from being: a Written Sentence; a Spoken Sentence; a Signed Sentence; ...
  • It can range from being an Active Sentence to being a Passive Sentence.
  • It can range from being a Communicative Sentence (e.g. exclamatory or imperative) to being an Informative Sentence (e.g. declarative or interrogative).
  • It can range from being a Short Sentence (incl. very-short), a Normal-Length Sentence to being a Long Sentence.
  • It can range from being a Simple Sentence to being a Complex Sentence.
  • It can range from being a Non-Compound Sentence to being a Compound Sentence.
  • It can range from being: a Causative Sentence; an Inchoative Sentence; an Applicative Sentence; ...
  • It can range from being: an English Sentence; a German Sentence; a Spanish Sentence; a Chinese Sentence; a Japanese Sentence; ...
  • It can be associated with: a Template Sentence; a Sentence Segment; ...
  • It can be Detected by a Sentence Detection Task.
  • It can bear no Syntactic Relation to the Utterances that may follow or precede the sequence.
  • It can be analyzed by a Sentence-level Analysis Task.
• Example(s):
  • “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”, a Grammatical Sentence in English.
  • “Yo caminé a mi casa ayer.”, a Grammatical Sentence in Spanish.
  • “I went home in the morning.”, a Declarative Sentence.
  • “When did you go home?”, an Interrogative Sentence.
  • “Home I walkked to yesturday.”, an Ungrammatical Sentence with Misspelled Words.
  • “Let's show off the Nokia N95 8G during Cape of Good Hope's ex-notaries public convention.”, with a Contraction, Named Entity Mention, Infix, Compound Noun, Compound Verb, Derivational Prefix.
  • other Linguistic Sentence Examples.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.”, a Word Sequence.
  • "1 1 2 3 5 8 13 ..” (A Number Sequence)
  • “home”, a Noun.
  • “ran home”, a Clause/Predicate.
  • a Mathematical Equation.
• See: Clause, Phrase, Text, Word, Natural Language Parsing.

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References

2013

• (Wikipedia, 2013) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics) Retrieved:2013-12-8.
  • A sentence is a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that are grammatically linked. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request, command or suggestion. A sentence can also be defined in orthographic terms alone, i.e., as anything which is contained between a capital letter and a full stop. For instance, the opening of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House begins with the following three sentences:

    :London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.

    The first sentence involves one word, a proper noun. The second sentence has only a non-finite verb. The third is a single nominal group. Only an orthographic definition encompasses this variation.

    As with all language expressions, sentences might contain function and content words and contain properties distinct to natural language, such as characteristic intonation and timing patterns.

    Sentences are generally characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb, e.g. “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.

• (Wikipedia, 2013) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics)#By_structure Retrieved:2013-12-8.
  • one traditional scheme for classifying English sentences is by the number and types of finite clauses:
    • A simple sentence consists of a single independent clause with no dependent clauses.
    • A compound sentence consists of multiple independent clauses with no dependent clauses. These clauses are joined together using conjunctions, punctuation, or both.
    • A complex sentence consists of one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.
    • A complex-compound sentence (or compound-complex sentence) consists of multiple independent clauses, at least one of which has at least one dependent clause.

2009

• WordNet ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=sentence
  • S: (n) sentence (a string of words satisfying the grammatical rules of a language) "he always spoke in grammatical sentences"
• Wiktionary ⇒ http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sentence
  • A grammatically complete series of words consisting of a subject and predicate, even if one or the other is implied, and typically beginning with …

2000

• (Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 2000) ⇒ Gennaro Chierchia, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. (2000). “Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics, 2nd edition." MIT Press.
  • QUOTE:Sentences, as opposed to whole texts, appear to be the smallest autonomous information units in a language (with some qualification having to do with context dependency - see below). Sentences comprise a category of well-formed structures capable of expressing thoughts that can stand on their own, or describing whole situations. Thus, perhaps getting at sentence meaning might be easier than getting at the meaning of other units.

1957

• (Chomsky, 1957) ⇒ Noam Chomsky. (1957). “Syntactic Structures." Mouton de Gruyter.
  • (1). “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
  • (2). “Furiously sleep ideas green colorless."
  • It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) had ever occurred in an English discourse. Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled out on identical grounds as equally "remote" from English. Yet (1), though nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not. [1]"

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