[b-greek] Re: Greek Sentence Structure

From: Moon-Ryul Jung (moon@sogang.ac.kr)
Date: Thu Jul 26 2001 - 18:52:08 EDT


Randy Wrote:

 Clay (and apparently others) suggest that because we cannot offer a
> rigorous definition of a sentence, we ought to abandon the term and,
> presumably, the basic concept which the term carries in most people's
> minds. Without having given much thought to the matter, I would assume
> that an attempted definition would at least roughly resemble the idea
> that it is a unit of thought consisting minimally of a subject (topic
> placed under discussion) and a predicate (assertion or question about
> the subject) and maximally of all coordinate and subordinate clauses
> that cohere into a single unit of thought.
>
> The defects of such a definition are immediately apparent. For
> example, should "Jack Spratt could eat no fat; his wife could eat no
> lean" be viewed as one sentence or two? There are clearly two separate
> subjects and predicates, but the two do cohere conceptually into a
> unity.

I would like to defend Randy's position. What he wants to keep can be
kept if we eliminate coordinate clauses from the scope of a "sentence".
The above example shows two sentences in sequence. Whether they are cohere
conceptually into a unity is beyond the syntactic definition of a
sentence.
That problem belongs to a discourse analysis. In sum, a sentence denotes
the minimal unit of thought, which can be described by means of
phrases denoting WHO, WHAT (predicate), WHEN, WHERE, WHY, and HOW. The
last
four can be denoted by adverbial phrases or clauses.

So, subordinate clauses do belong to a sentence, but not coordinate
clauses,
which are better considered to form multiple sentences.

Moon
Moon-Ryul Jung
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea

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