Communicative Types

Lecture 16.

The Simple Sentence

Communicative Types

The primary classification of sentences is based on the communicative principle (referred to as the purpose of communication).

According to the purpose of communication there are distinguished:

1) the declarative sentence;

2) the imperative (inducive) sentence;

3) the interrogative sentence.

These communicative sentence-types stand in opposition to one another.

The declarative sentence expresses a statement, either affirmative or negative, and stands in systemic syntagmatic correlation with the listener's responding signals of attention, of appraisal (including agreement or disagreement), of fellow-feeling.

The imperative sentence expresses inducement, either affirmative or negative. It urges the listener, in the form of request or command, to perform or not to perform a certain action. The imperative sentence is situationally connected with the corresponding ‘action response’ (Ch. Fries), and lingually is systemically correlated with a verbal response showing that the inducement is either complied with, or else rejected.

The interrogative sentence expresses a question, i.e. a request for information wanted by the speaker from the listener. The interrogative sentence is naturally connected with an answer, forming together with it a question-answer dialogue unity.

Besides the three cardinal communicative sentence-types, another type of sentences is recognised in the theory of syntax: the exclamatory sentence. In modern linguistics it has been demonstrated that exclamatory sentences do not possess any complete set of qualities that could place them on one and the same level with the three cardinal communicative types of sentences. The property of exclamation is therefore considered as an accompanying feature which is effected within the system of the three cardinal communicative types of sentences. In other words, each of the cardinal communicative sentence types can be represented in the two variants: non-exclamatory and exclamatory (What a very small cabin it was! = It was a very small cabin).

Some linguists recognize the so-called purely exclamatory type of sentence that cannot be reduced to any of the three cardinal communicative types. By purely exclamatory sentences are meant interjectional exclamations of ready-made order such as ‘Great Heavens!’, ‘Good Lord!’, ‘For God's sake!’, ‘Oh, I say!’ and the like, which find themselves in self-dependent isolated positions in the text. Such utterances serve as mere symptoms of emotions, consciously or unconsciously produced shouts of strong feelings (non-sentential utterances).

Exclamatory sentences with emphatic introducers derived on special productive syntactic patterns should be regarded separately (How silly of you!). These constructions also express emotions, but they are meaningfully articulate and proposemically complete. They clearly display a definite nominative composition which is predicated.

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