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Encyclopedia entry: SENTENCE
- Article from:
- Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language
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Copyright© Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998. (Hide copyright information)
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SENTENCE
The largest structural unit normally treated in GRAMMAR. The sentence is notoriously difficult to define; numerous definitions have been offered and found wanting. The classical definition, that a sentence expresses a complete thought, dates from the first Western treatise on grammar, by Dionysius Thrax (
c.
100 BC), whose interest lay primarily in analysing, using, and teaching written Greek. This traditional notional definition, however, only solves the problem by transferring it: how does one define a complete thought? Linguists and anthropologists in the 19–20c, trained in the Greco-Latin grammatical tradition and faced with the analysis of previously unwritten ...