This week: sententious sentences sentencing senselessly! Also, footnotes and a bit of recommended reading to get us out. Here we go.
Put a couple of words together and you get a clause. Put a couple of clauses together and you have a sentence, right? Right. Kind of. Merriam-Webster's definition is all-encompassing:
a word, clause, or phrase or a group of clauses or phrases forming a syntactic unit which expresses an assertion, a question, a command, a wish, an exclamation, or the performance of an action, that in writing usually begins with a capital letter and concludes with appropriate end punctuation, and that in speaking is distinguished by characteristic patterns of stress, pitch, and pauses
Let's unpack that just a bit. Grammarians (1) insist that a sentence is only a sentence when and if it has both a subject and a predicate. In other words, a sentence has to be about someone or something (the subject) and, as the Merriam-Webster definition says, has to show how something is interacting with, or acting on the subject. In other words, a sentence has to answer both who and what. Here's an example taken from the Bible. In the Gospel of John, Chapter 11, verse 35 is a single sentence comprised of a mere two words: Jesus wept. And yet, these two words tell us both who the sentence is about and what action he performed.
But, of course, not every sentence is so short. In fact, sentences can run on just about indefinitely given enough punctuation. James Joyce's Ulysses contains a monologue in a single sentence that takes up 36 pages. But most sentences in English clock in between 15 and 20 words. When written.
Let's go back to the second half of the Merriam-Webster definition - spoken sentences are distinguished by rhythm and tone. When discussing phrases in previous issues, I said that most people actually speak in phrases rather than sentences. And this is because, in most casual conversation, there is an ebb and flow that precludes the use of grammatical (3) sentences. Think about how often we interrupt each other and ourselves, or digress into side-topics, or just lost track of what we wanted to say and trail off altogether? And yet, we know, intuitively, what comprises a sentence when we hear one.
When we're speaking formally, it can be a little bit easier to strictly mark our sentences through the use of cadence and longer pauses (4). There's a limit to how well this works though as good public speaking uses differences in register to create a flow that may not adhere to a strict grammatical definition of sentence, phrase, and so on. So, much like the rest of the basic concepts we've looked at so far, we find that a sentence is really hard to define and yet...we know one when we hear one.
But sentence has another meaning, one completely removed from its grammatical application. Merriam-Webster again:
one formally pronounced by a court or judge in a criminal proceeding and specifying the punishment to be inflicted upon the convict
Much like clause, the non-grammatical meaning seems to have appeared, in English, before the grammar-related one. Etymology Online tells us that sentence as judgement comes from the 14th century while sentence as grammar comes from the mid-15th century. However, the roots of the word shows just how it came to have both meanings:
directly from Latin sententia "thought, way of thinking, opinion; judgment, decision," also "a thought expressed; aphorism, saying," from sentientem, present participle of sentire "be of opinion, feel, perceive"
So far, we've been dealing strictly with noun cases of sentence. And yet to sentence is a verb with a long history. Come back next week to learn all about it.
Footnotes
Why is it not grammarcist? Doesn't that just sound...better? Interestingly, another not-yet-a-word for grammarian is grammarist, which Urban Dictionary defines as "Someone who judges others for using poor grammar." Sounds about right.
Unlike mine.
Once again we're faced with the prescriptivist vs. descriptivist debate, especially as teachers. We don't want to police speech, yet if students have to pass a standardized test of any stripe, they have to be able to create a standard sentence. Right? Maybe?
Back in my school days, I was taught that a comma was a one-beat pause, but that a period was a two-beat pause when making a speech.
Recommended Reading
The debate about how long a sentence should be is old and pointless. However, there has been some research showing that the average length of a sentence has been declining over the past few centuries. This piece in The Acropolitan (which may be defunct?) puts some numbers to the research, while this one in Nautilus (which I've linked before) discusses some of the whys inherent in the length of English sentences.
While researching this article, I came across a few interesting pieces examining different examples of both very short and very long sentences in classic works of literature. Among the short, Lolita, Moby Dick, and Albert Camus' The Stranger. On the longer side, there is is the aforementioned Ulysses alongside Rabbit Run, Infinite Jest, and The Handmaid's Tale.
But, of course the best listicles are the ones that pull together the best opening lines in fiction, regardless of length.
Stay curious,
J
One Sentence After Another
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