Classification of sentences according to the purpose of communication

Classification of sentences according to the purpose of communication

During our everyday speech, during different types of conversations we use hundreds of sentences and we do this automatically, without even consciousness. When we speak or write, we convey our thoughts through sentences. A sentence is the smallest lingual unit which is capable of performing a communication, containing some kind of information. With the help of a sentence we can make a statement command or request or ask a question.

 Sentence is the basic unit of syntax. There are so many definitions concerning sentence. According to famous Russian grammarian Ilyish (1971) the notion of sentence has not so far received a satisfactory definition, which would enable us by applying it in every particular case to find out whether a certain linguistic unit is a sentence or not. ( Ilysh,1971 )

According to Vikulova E. A. (2014) sentence is the second linguistic unit falling under syntax and it must be viewed as a separate level of linguistic analyses. One of the very many definitions of the sentence is that it is nominal syntactic structure used in speech communication, distinguished by predication and built up of words in accordance with definite syntactic patterns”( Vikulova 2014: 66)

Anyway, we can say that sentence is a unit of speech whose grammatical structure conforms to the low of the language and which serves as the chief means of conveying a thought or information. It is not only a means of communicating something about reality but also a means of showing the speaker’s attitude to it. file:///E:/Theoretical-Course-of-English-Grammar-28Script29%20(1).pdf

As Russian grammarian Blokh (1983) states “the sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose”. As a consequence, he claims that any consentient connections of words which have informative purpose are analyzed within the framework of the sentence. Accordingly the sentence is the main object of syntax as part of the grammatical theory (Блох 1983: 236).

Brown, Brown and Miller (1991) define the sentence as the maximum grammatical unit:” A grammatical unit between the constituent parts of which distributional limitations and dependencies can be established, but which can itself be put into no distributing class”. This pays the way for the idea that sentence has a certain sort of unity, from grammatical viewpoint it is complete, it can stand by its own and have a meaning, it is independent of context and it has degree of semantic independence.

As it is mentioned above, sentences are served for communicative purpose. We use sentences in order to communicate, to share our thoughts with others and so on. This means that we need to have some participants of this process. During the communication, three basic elements are needed and the communication act is based on the coordination of these elements: the act of speech, the speaker and the reality. (Mkhitaryan, Chubaryan 2014: 178)

The classification of the sentence is among the most complicated items in Grammar. Before giving the classification of the sentences let’s have a look on these two questions and find out what are the main differences between them.

1. Where is the nearest hotel?
2. One’s knowledge is always limited no matter how intelligent he or she is.

As we see, these two sentences are basically different.

1. In the example a. we have a sentence which expresses a question and the speaker expects an answer for his/her question. This answer will supply the information he/she needed while asking the question. In the case of b. we have a statement, the speakers inform us about something or he/she gives us his/her opinion on a certain subject.  The purpose of this sentence is not to ask for something, or to clarify something unknown, the author does not expect anybody to supply the information needed.

2. Example a. has a certain addresser, i.e. it is addressed to a certain hearer and is meant to provoke the hearer’s attention. b. is not addressed to a particular person and the speaker or the author does not expect someone’s reaction to it.

3. Besides these differences they differ also in their length.

These differences may be considered as the main points of difference. It would be a mistake if we prefer some of these as relevant or less important from grammatical viewpoint. Taking into consideration the above-mentioned cases we can say that classification of a sentence is really controversial and is very difficult to say exactly what kind of classification we have.      [Ilyish 1971]

There are different ways of sentence classification. When we speak about the classification of a sentence, we me mean the division of a sentence into different groups according to this or that features.

In English sentences are classified according to two main principles:

1. According to the purpose of utterance
2. According to the structure of a sentence

Types of sentences according to utterance or types of communication are as follows:

1. Declarative sentences
2. Interrogative sentences
3. Imperative sentences
4. Exclamatory sentences

The same classification exists in the Armenian language.

The purpose of communication refers to the sentence as a whole, and the structural features connected with the expression of this sentential function belong to the fundamental, constitutive qualities of the sentence as a lingual unit. Sentences not only differ from each other from their type of communication, they may differ from grammatical point of view. This means that sentences may have special grammatical word order, such as interrogative sentences which have special word order. In interrogative sentences modal words are used merely. The matter of this is that many modal verbs have meanings which are quite different from those of interrogative sentences. Admittedly we can say that there are some modal verbs expressing full of certainty, such as certainly, surely, naturally which may not be used in a sentence which expresses a question.

Declarative sentence

It is widely accepted truth that declarative sentences are always in affirmative or negative form. In declarative sentences the predicate is followed by a subject. This kind of sentences is the most common sentences in all sphere of life. (Ilyish1971 :221)

E.g. Tim Allerton leant back in his wicker chair and yawned as he looked out over the sea. [Agatha Christie “Death on the Nile”]

Interrogative sentence

The interrogative sentence expresses a question, i.e.  a request for information wanted by the speaker from the listener. The interrogative sentence is naturally connected with an answer, forming together with it a question-answer dialogue unity. the interrogative sentence is formed with the help of inversion, i.e. by placing the predicate or at least a part of it before the subject. This does not occur, when the subject of the interrogative sentence is an interrogative word. In this case there is no inversion.