A SENTENCE FRAGMENT fails to be a sentence in the sense that it cannot stand by itself.

It does not contain even one independent clause. There are several reasons why a group of words may seem to act like a sentence but not have the wherewithal to make it as a complete thought. It may locate something in time and place with a prepositional phrase or a series of such phrases, but it's still lacking a proper subject-verb relationship within an independent clause: In Japan, during the last war and just before the armistice. This sentence accomplishes a great deal in terms of placing the reader in time and place, but there is no subject, no verb. It describes something, but there is no subject-verb relationship: Working far into the night in an effort to salvage her little boat. This is a verbal phrase that wants to modify something, the real subject of the sentence (about to come up), probably the she who was working so hard. It may have most of the makings of a sentence but still be missing an important part of a verb string: Some of the students working in Professor Espinoza's laboratory last semester. Remember that an -ing verb form without an auxiliary form to accompany it can never be a verb. It may even have a subject-verb relationship, but it has been subordinated to another idea by a dependent word and so cannot stand by itself: Even though he had the better arguments and was by far the more powerful speaker. This sentence fragment has a subject, he, and two verbs, had and was, but it cannot stand by itself because of the dependent word (subordinating conjunction) even though. We need an independent clause to follow up this dependent clause: . . . the more powerful speaker, he lost the case because he didn't understand the jury.

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Grammar and Usage - sentence fragment: phrase or clause written as sentence but lacking subject or verb

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Sentence (linguistics)
Top Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language. It is often defined as a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request, command or suggestion.[1] A sentence can also be defined in orthographic terms alone, i.e., as anything which is contained between a capital letter and a full stop.[2] For instance, the opening of Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House begins with the following three sentences: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. The first sentence involves one word, a proper noun. The second sentence has only a nonfinite verb. The third is a single nominal group. Only an orthographic definition encompasses this variation. As with all language expressions, sentences may contain both function and content words, and contain properties distinct to natural language, such as characteristic intonation and timing patterns. Sentences are generally characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb, e.g. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Contents

1 Components of a sentence o 1.1 Clauses 2 Classification o 2.1 By structure o 2.2 By purpose o 2.3 Major and minor sentences 3 Sentence length 4 See also 5 References

6 External links

Components of a sentence
Clauses
A clause typically contains at least a subject noun phrase and a finite verb. While the subject is usually a noun phrase, other kinds of phrases (such as gerund phrases) work as well, and some languages allow subjects to be omitted. There are two types of clauses: independent and subordinate (dependent). An independent clause demonstrates a complete thought; it is a complete sentence: for example, I am sad. A subordinate clause is not a complete sentence: for example, because I have no friends. See also copula for the consequences of the verb to be on the theory of sentence structure. A simple complete sentence consists of a single clause. Other complete sentences consist of two or more clauses (see below).

Classification
By structure
One traditional scheme for classifying English sentences is by the number and types of finite clauses:

A simple sentence consists of a single independent clause with no dependent clauses. A compound sentence consists of multiple independent clauses with no dependent clauses. These clauses are joined together using conjunctions, punctuation, or both. A complex sentence consists of at least one independent clause and one dependent clause. A complex-compound sentence (or compound-complex sentence) consists of multiple independent clauses, at least one of which has at least one dependent clause.

By purpose
Sentences can also be classified based on their purpose:

A declarative sentence or declaration, the most common type, commonly makes a statement: "I have to go to work." An interrogative sentence or question is commonly used to request information "Do I have to go to work?" but sometimes not; see rhetorical question. An exclamatory sentence or exclamation is generally a more emphatic form of statement expressing emotion: "I have to go to work!" An imperative sentence or command tells someone to do something (and if done strongly may be considered both imperative and exclamatory): "Go to work." or "Go to work!"

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 sentence. It does not contain a finite verb. For example, "Mary!" "Yes." "Coffee." etc. 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 nominal sentences like "The more, the merrier". These do not contain verbs in order to intensify the meaning around the nouns and are normally found in poetry and catchphrases.[3] Sentences that comprise a single word are called word sentences, and the words themselves sentence words.[4]

Sentence length
After a slump of interest, sentence length came to be studied in the 1980s, mostly "with respect to other syntactic phenomena".[5] By some definitions, the average size length of a sentence is given by "no. of words / no. of sentences". [6] The textbook Mathematical linguistics, written by Andrs Kornaiin suggests that in "journalistic prose the median sentence length is above 15 words".[7] The average length of a sentence generally serves as a measure of sentence difficulty or complexity.[8] The general trend is that as the average sentence length increases, the complexity of the sentences also increases.[9] In some circumstances "sentence length" is expressed by the number of clauses, while the "clause length" is expressed by the number of phones.[10] D. L. Olmsted points out that the length of a sentence, even without any testing, can arbitrarily reach a maximum, because "[every] sentence [has a] length of less than a million words".[11] One Twitter writer acknowledged the fact that internet media lend themselves to shorter, more fragmented sentences by saying, "translating Cicero and such, I've found that the greatest speakers of history have sentence lengths that make our present day structure seem juvenile."[12] A test done by Erik Schils and Pieter de Haan (by sampling five texts) showed that any two adjacent sentences are more likely to have similar lengths, and almost certainly have similar length when from a text in the fiction genre. This countered the theory that "authors may aim at an alternation of long and short sentence".[13] Sentence length, as well as word difficulty, are both factors in the readability of a sentence. [14] However, other factors, such as the presence of conjunctions, have been said to "facilitate comprehension considerably". [15]

See also

Affirmation Assertion Grammatical polarity

Inflectional phrase Periodic sentence Sentence arrangement Sentence function T-unit

References
1. ^ "'Sentence' - Definitions from Dictionary.com". Dictionary.com. Retrieved 200805-23. 2. ^ Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Arnold: p6. 3. ^ Exploring Language: Sentences 4. ^ Jan Noordegraaf (2001). "J. M. Hoogvliet as a teacher and theoretician". In Marcel Bax, C. Jan-Wouter Zwart, and A. J. van Essen. Reflections on Language and Language Learning. John Benjamins B.V.. pp. 24. ISBN 9027225842. 5. ^ Titelov, Marie (1992). Quantatative Linguistics. pp. 126. Retrieved December 15, 2011. 6. ^ "Calculate Average Sentence Length". Linguistics Forum. Jun 23, 2011. Retrieved December 12, 2011. 7. ^ Kornai, Andrs. Mathematical linguistics. pp. 188. Retrieved December 15, 2011. 8. ^ Perera, Katherine. The assessment of sentence difficulty. pp. 108. Retrieved December 15, 2011. 9. ^ Troia, Gary A.. Instruction and assessment for struggling writers: evidence-based practices. pp. 370. Retrieved December 15, 2011. 10. ^ Reinhard Khler, Gabriel Altmann, Ramond Genrikhovich Piotrovski (2005). Quantatative Linguistics. p. 352. Retrieved December 15, 2011. "Caption):Table 26.3: Sentence length (expressed by the number of clauses) and clause length (expressed by the number of phones) in a Turkish text" 11. ^ Olmsted, D. L. (March, 1967). "On some Axioms about Sentence Length". Linguistic Society of America. pp. 303305. Retrieved December 12, 2011. 12. ^ "Language Log on Twitter and "Real trends in word and sentence length"". Retrieved December 12, 2011. 13. ^ Erik Schils, Pieter de Haan (1993). "Characteristics of Sentence Length in Running Text". Oxford University Press. Retrieved December 12, 2011. 14. ^ Perera, Katherine. The assessment of sentence difficulty. pp. 108. Retrieved December 15, 2011. 15. ^ Fries, Udo. Sentence Length, Sentence Complexity, and the Noun Phrase in 18thCentury News Publications. pp. 21. Retrieved December 15, 2011.

External links

Basic Sentence Structures The definition and meaning of the words "idea", "thought" and "sentence". Sentence Variety: Sentence Types The Sentence: A Group of Words Expressing a Meaning "The Book-Length Sentence" and "The Art of the Very Long Sentence", a history of very long sentences. Ed Park, New York Times Book Review, December 24, 2010 and January 3, 2011 (respe

ctively).

phraseup* - A writing assistant that helps with completing sentences by finding the missing words we can't recall.

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Sebuah FRAGMENT KALIMAT gagal menjadi kalimat dalam arti bahwa ia tidak dapat berdiri sendiri. Ini tidak berisi bahkan satu klausa independen. Ada beberapa alasan mengapa kelompok kata mungkin tampak untuk bertindak seperti sebuah kalimat tetapi tidak memiliki sarana untuk menjadikannya sebagai pemikiran yang lengkap Mungkin menemukan sesuatu dalam waktu dan tempat dengan frase preposisional atau serangkaian frase tersebut, tapi masih kurang hubungan subjek-kata kerja yang tepat dalam sebuah klausa independen: Di Jepang, selama perang terakhir dan sebelum gencatan senjata. Kalimat ini menyelesaikan banyak dalam hal menempatkan pembaca dalam waktu dan tempat, tetapi tidak ada subjek, kata kerja tidak ada.