Tutoring Done Write

EXPERTS DISAGREE AS TO WHAT IS A SENTENCE

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "sentence" to mean "way of thinking, opinion." The word "sentence" first appeared in 1340. The OED continues by stating that sentence means in the second sense: "The opinion pronounced by a person on some particular question, usually, one on which he is consulted or which is being deliberated upon."

Less philosophically and more academically, Margaret Shertzer writes that "a sentence expresses a complete thought and consists of a subject and a predicate. (If either the subject or predicate is not expressed, it must be readily understood from sentences that precede or follow.)"

A "sentence" is also an authoritative decision by a court. For example, the criminal defendant was sentenced to a 6 year term of imprisonment. If you are a native English speaker, this is is nonsense.

You are probably asking yourself: what does it matter whether I can define a sentence, I know what a sentence is, I know one when I see one. There are plenty of reasons, I submit, for knowing how to define the simple word "sentence." First, its fun (at least the way I do it). Second, it opens up our language and all its constituent parts. In short, defining the word sentence will expose you to the richness of our linguistic and grammatical language.

To fully understand a sentence, we are better off breaking it down into its constitute parts. A better question when considering the word sentence: what parts are needed to have a "sentence?"

I'm sure you know that a sentence needs a subject (even if you don't know the subject of the sentence). But do all sentences require a subject? Hum . . . let take that up later.

A subject is, generally speaking, a noun. A noun is the name (or the word we use) for a person, a place, an object, or an idea. There are many sub-categories of nouns and we will cover that later as well. For now, know that nouns are used as the subject or subjects of a sentence (house, car, wife, iPhone, Facebook account, etc).

Don't forget (and not to confuse matters) but nouns can be the object of verbs (which shows the action or state of being, and it also indicated the time of action or being) and prepositions (which show how a noun or pronoun is related to another word in a sentence).

Simple examples

Verb
She played the violin. [verb = played]

Preposition
The clown came bounding into the restaurant. [preposition = into]

To write a grammatically correct sentence (as opposed to oral sentences, which we will see are quite different), we need "agreement" between the verb and noun and the adjective and noun. Agreement simply means if the nouns is singular the verb is singular, if the noun is plural the verb is plural.

Simple Examples

Singular
The dog is chasing the cat.

Plural
The dogs are chasing the cat.