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In linguistics, a sentence is a unit of language, characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. For example, "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog."
The parts of a sentence Traditionally, each sentence is regarded as having a subject, an object and a verb, even if one of these is implied. See grammar for more details. The objects that modify the noun phrase collectively form the predicate of a sentence. An incomplete sentence is called a sentence fragment. Classification by structure One traditional scheme for classifying English sentences is by the number and types of finite clauses: Classification by purpose Sentences can also be classified based on their purpose: Major and minor sentences A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate. For example: I have a ball. In this sentence one can change the persons: We have a ball. However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of a sentence. It does not follow all the grammatical rules; For example: How do you do? In this sentence one cannot change the person, for example. It is a kind of greeting and therefore saying How do they do? is not something one would normally express in a greeting. Other examples of minor sentences are headings (e.g. the heading of this entry), stereotyped expressions (Hello!), emotional expressions (Wow!), proverbs etc. This can also include sentences which do not contain verbs (e.g. The more, the merrier.) in order to intensify the meaning around the nouns (normally found in poetry and catchphrases) 1. | ||||||||
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