sentence

sentence

1. Many users of this book will have been taught that a sentence is a group of words that makes complete sense, contains a main verb, and when written begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop (or a question mark if it is a question or an exclamation mark if it is an exclamation). This is a good working definition, and rather than pick holes in it we might more profitably add certain riders to it:

2. A sentence can contain ellipsis, i.e. a verb and other words can be understood or suppressed:

• It had been a good party. An unforgettable party, actually. And still was —A. Huth, 1992.

(Ellipsis of it had been in the second sentence and it in the third.) Grammarians may argue about whether these are all true sentences, but for practical purposes it is sensible to regard them all as qualifying for the term, if only to make straightforward discussion about language structure possible.

3. There are three basic kinds of sentence. A simple sentence normally contains one statement: It had been a good party. A compound sentence contains more than one statement, normally joined by a conjunction such as and or but: It had been a good party and we had all enjoyed it / It had been a good party but I had known better. A complex sentence contains a main clause and one or more subordinate clauses, such as a relative clause introduced by which or who: It had been a good party, which we all enjoyed very much.