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The Discourse Functions of Sentences

Sentences may be classified according to their use in discourse. We recognise four main sentence types:

  • declarative
  • interrogative
  • imperative
  • exclamative

Declarative

Declarative sentences are used to convey information or to make statements:

David plays the piano
I hope you can come tomorrow
We've forgotten the milk

Declarative sentences are by far the most common type.

Interrogative

Interrogative sentences are used in asking questions:

Is this your book?
Did you receive my message?
Have you found a new job yet?

The examples above are specifically YES/NO INTERROGATIVES, because they elicit a response which is either yes or no.

ALTERNATIVE INTERROGATIVES offer two or more alternative responses:

Should I telephone you or send an email?
Do you want tea, coffee, or espresso?

Yes/no interrogatives and alternative interrogatives are introduced by an auxiliary verb.

WH- INTERROGATIVES, on the other hand, are introduced by a wh- word, and they elicit an open-ended response:

What happened?
Where do you work?
Who won the Cup Final in 1997?

Questions are sometimes tagged onto the end of a declarative sentence:

David plays the piano, doesn't he?
We've forgotten the milk, haven't we?
There's a big match tonight, isn't there?

These are known as TAG QUESTIONS. They consist of a main or auxiliary verb followed by a pronoun or existential there

Imperative

Imperative sentences are used in issuing orders or directives:

Leave your coat in the hall
Give me your phone number
Don't shut the door
Stop!

Tag questions are sometimes added to the end of imperatives:

Leave your coat in the hall, will you?
Write soon, won't you?

In an imperative sentence, the main verb is in the base form. This is an exception to the general rule that matrix clauses are always finite.

Exclamative

Exclamative sentences are used to make exclamations:

What a stupid man he is!
How wonderful you look!

The four sentence types exhibit different syntactic forms, which we will be looking at in a later section. For now, it is worth pointing out that there is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship between the form of a sentence and its discourse function. For instance, the following sentence has declarative form:

You need some help

But when this is spoken with a rising intonation, it becomes a question:

You need some help?

Conversely, rhetorical questions have the form of an interrogative, but they are really statements:

Who cares? ( = I don't care)

11.7 The Grammatical Hierarchy: Words, Phrases, Clauses, and Sentences

Words, phrases, clauses, and sentences constitute what is called the GRAMMATICAL HIERARCHY. We can represent this schematically as follows:

sentences
consist of one or more...

clauses
consist of one or more
...

phrases
consist of one or more...

Words

Sentences are at the top of the hierarchy, so they are the largest unit which we will be considering (though some grammars do look beyond the sentence). At the other end of the hierarchy, words are at the lowest level, though again, some grammars go below the word to consider morphology, the study of how words are constructed.



At the clause level and at the phrase level, two points should be noted:

1.Although clauses are higher than phrases in the hierarchy, clauses can occur within phrases, as we've already seen:

The man who lives beside us is ill

Here we have a relative clause who lives beside us within the NP the man who lives beside us.

2.We've also seen that clauses can occur within clauses, and phrases can occur within phrases.

Bearing these two points in mind, we can now illustrate the grammatical hierarchy using the following sentence:

My brother won the lottery

As a means of illustrating the grammatical hierarchy, the labelled brackets we have used here have at least one major drawback. You've probably noticed it already -- they are very difficult to interpret. And the problem becomes more acute as the sentence becomes more complex. For this reason, linguists prefer to employ a more visual method, the TREE DIAGRAM.

Form and Function

We have used the word "form" quite often in the Internet Grammar. It was one of the criteria we used to distinguish between word classes -- we saw that the form or "shape" of a word is often a good clue to its word class.

When we looked at phrases, too, we were concerned with their form. We said that phrases may have the basic form (Pre-Head string) - Head - (Post-Head string).

And finally, we classified clauses according to the form (finite or nonfinite) of their main verb.

In all of these cases, we were conducting a FORMAL analysis. Form denotes how something looks -- its shape or appearance, and what its structure is. When we say that the old man is an NP, or that the old man bought a newspaper is a finite clause, we are carrying out a formal analysis.

We can also look at constituents -- phrases and clauses -- from another angle. We can examine the FUNCTIONs which they perform in the larger structures which contain them.


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1002


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