14
An Introduction to English Grammar
Trees May Be a Source of Pollution An Irish Airman Foresees his Death (title of poem) Do not enter But the most serious objection is that the definition is directed only towards orthographic sentences; that is, sentences that appear in the written language. Spoken sentences, of course, do not have capital letters and full stops. It is in fact far more difficult to determine the limits of sentences in natural conversation, to say where sentences begin and end. That is so partly because people may change direction as they speak and partly because they tend to make heavy use of connectors such as and, but, so, and then. Here is a typical example of a speaker who strings sentences together with and. The symbol <,> denotes a pause. I’d been working away this week trying to clear up <,> the backlog of mail caused by me being three weeks away <,> and I thought I was doing marvellously <,> and at about <,> six o’clock last night <,> I was sorting through <,> stuff on the desk and I discovered a fat pile of stuff <,> all carefully opened and documented by Sally that I hadn’t even seen How many orthographic sentences correspond to the speaker’s story? There is no one correct answer. In writing it we have a choice: we could punctuate it as one sentence or we could split it into two or more sentences, each of the later sentences beginning with and. Grammarians are not unduly worried about the difficulties in defining the sentence. Their approach to the question is formal because they are interested in grammatical form. Like many people who are not grammarians, they are generally confident of recognizing sentences, and they specify the possible patterns for the sentences. Combinations of words that conform to those patterns are then grammatical sentences.
2.2
Irregular sentences and non-sentences
Sentences that conform to the major patterns (cf. 3.13) are regular sentences, and they are the type that will generally concern us in this book. Sentences that do not conform to the major patterns are irregular sentences. If I ask you to write down the first sentences that come into your mind, you are likely to produce regular sentences. Here are some regular sentences in various major patterns: David and Helen have three children. The liquid smelled spicy to Justin. Some people give their children a daily dose of vitamins. About a million visitors come to our city every summer.