The sentence is a minimal unit of communication. From the viewpoint of their role in the process of communication sentences are divided into 4 types: declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory. These types differ in the aim of communication and express statements, questions, commands and exclamations respectively. Dickens was born in 1812. Come up and sit down. What a quiet evening! A declarative sentence contains a statement which gives the reader or the listener some information about various events, activities or attitudes, thoughts and feelings. A statement may be positive (affirmative) or negative, as in: I have just come back from a business trip. I haven't seen my sister yet. Interrogative sentences contain questions. Their communicative function consists in asking for information. They belong to the sphere of conversation and only occasionally occur in monological speech. All varieties of questions may be structurally reduced to two main types, general questions (also called "yes-no" questions) and pronominal questions (otherwise called "special" or "wh"-questions). In general questions the speaker is interested to know whether some event or phenomenon asked about exists or does not exist. A general question opens with a verb operator, that is, an auxiliary, modal or link verb followed by the subject. Is that girl a friend of yours? Can you speak French? A tag question is a short "yes-no" question added to a statement. It consists only of an operator prompted by the predicate verb of the statement and a pronoun prompted by the subject. George is a football fan, isn't he? You know French, don't you? An alternative question implies a choice between two or more alternative answers. The conjunction or links either two homogeneous parts of the sentence or two coordinate clauses. Will you go to the opera or to the concert to-night? Which do you prefer, tea or coffee? Suggestive questions (declarative) keep the word order of statement but serve as questions owing to the rising tone in speaking: You still don't believe me, sir? So you knew about it before? Pronominal questions open with an interrogative pronoun or a pronominal adverb, the function of which is to get more detailed and exact information about some event or phenomenon known to the speaker and listener. The interrogative pronouns and adverbs: what, which, who, whom, whose, where, when, why, how: Whose team has won the match? Which story did you like best? Who came first? A rhetorical question contains a statement disguised as a question, which is usually positive hiding a negative statement. No answer is expected. What else could I do? Do we always act as we ought to? Imperative sentences express commands which convey the desire of the speaker to make someone, generally the listener, perform an action. Besides they may express prohibition, a request, an invitation, a warning, persuasion, depending on the situation, context or intonation. Stand up! Sit down. Open your textbooks. Be quick! Exclamatory sentence. Each of the communicative sentence types, besides performing their main communicative function, may serve as exclamations. You do look a picture of health! (statement) Hurry up! (command). An exclamation as a sentence type opens with one of the pronominal words what and how. What refers to a noun, how to an adjective or an adverb. What a terrible noise! What a funny story she told us!
10.Two main types of meaning Word meaning is made up of various components which are interrelated and interdependent. These components are commonly described as types of meanings. Two main types of word meaning are grammatical and lexical. Grammatical meaning consists of word-class and inflectional paradigm. Word-class: When a dictionary lists the function of a word, the definition does at least two things: it describes the word’s lexical meaning and also gives what is traditionally known as the part of speech of the word, which modern linguists call the word-class; e.g.: modern will be marked as an adjective, modernize an a verb, and modernization as a noun. The word-class is essential, for when we use a word in a sentence, we have to take into consideration two factors: its specific lexical meaning and the position it normally occupies in a sentence, which is determined by the word-class to which the word belongs. Inflectional paradigm: When used in actual speech, words appear in different forms; e.g.: cat-cats, mouse-mice; to walk, walks walked, to write, writes, wrote, written, etc. The set of grammatical forms of a word is called its paradigm. Nouns are declined, verbs are conjugated, and gradable adjectives have degrees of comparison. The lexical meaning of a word is the same throughout the paradigm the paradigm; that is, all the word-forms of one and the same word have the same lexical meaning, yet the grammatical meaning varies from one word-form to another, e.g.: cat is grammatically singular in meaning while cats is plural; writes denotes third person, singular, present tense, whereas wrote denotes past tense. On the other hand the grammatical meaning is the same in identical sets of individual forms of different words, for example, the past-tense meaning in the word-forms of different verbs(played, sang, worked, etc.), or the grammatical meaning of plurality in the word-forms of various nouns(desks, data, boxes, etc.) Lexical meaning Another component of word meaning is lexical meaning, which is different from grammatical meaning in two aspects: first, the lexical meaning of a word is the same in all the forms of one and the same word while the grammatical meaning varies from one word-form to another; second, every word has a different lexical meaning, whereas the grammatical meaning is the same in identical sets of individual forms of different word. Hence we may describe lexical meaning as that component of meaning proper to the word as a lexical item. Lexical meaning may be subdivided into denotative meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning and affective meaning.
