Everything about Sentence function
Intended purpose of spoken speech
In linguistics, a sentence function refers to a speaker's purpose in uttering a specific sentence, clause, or phrase. Whether a listener is present or not is sometimes irrelevant. It answers the question: "Why has this been said?" The five basic sentence forms in English are the declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative and the optative. These correspond to the discourse functions statement, question, exclamation, and command respectively. The different forms involve different combinations in word order, the addition of certain auxiliaries or particles, or other times by providing a special form. There is no clear one-to-one correspondence between the forms/structures and their discourse functions. For example, a declarative form can be used to ask a question, and interrogative form can be used to make a statement. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: Sentence functionA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: Sentence Determination as a Function of Sex Offender GenderInfluential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: Perspectiva funcional da frase portuguesaThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: Cortico-striatal function in sentence comprehension: Insights from neurophysiology and modelingCited 66 times
- Go sideways: QuestionA closely related topic
- Go sideways: InterrogativeA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
No dictionary entry for this exact phrase.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
Cortico-striatal function in sentence comprehension: Insights from neurophysiology and modeling
Sentence types and the form-function fit
Children’s sensitivity to function words during sentence comprehension
Imagery and comprehension latencies as a function of sentence concreteness and structure
How the brain attunes to sentence processing: Relating behavior, structure, and function
Executive Function and Ambiguous Sentence Comprehension
Sentence Intelligibility as a Function of Key Word Selection
The Reliability of Developmental Sentence Scoring as a Function of Sample Size
🆕 Influential since 2022
Sentence Determination as a Function of Sex Offender Gender
SYNTACTIC FUNCTION OF AN INFINITIVE IN AN INFINITIVE-SUBSTANTIVE SENTENCE
Sentence repetition as a function of episodic buffer: a pilot study in Croatian
Syntactic function of conversion ina sentence
Copying The Addition Function in The Arabic Sentence
📚 Books worth reading
- 📕Perspectiva funcional da frase portuguesaRodolfo Ilari · 1986
- 📕Semantic Structure in EnglishJim Feist · 2016
- 📕Lauseita ja vesinokkaeläimiäSusanna Shore, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura · 2020
- 📕Tekst i slozhnoe sintaksicheskoe t︠s︡eloeN. V. Malycheva · 2003
- 📕Functional sentence perspective in Albanian textsArion Skënderi · 1997
- 📕Base-1 methodBernd Nuss · 2018
- 📕Perspectives on Linguistic Structure and ContextStacey Katz Bourns, Myers, Lindsy L. (Linguist) · 2014
- 📕Podlezhashchee i skazuemoe v obsko-ugorskikh i︠a︡zykakhN. A. Lyskova · 2007
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
- Question A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical…
- Interrogative An interrogative clause is a clause whose form is typically associated with question-like meanings. For instance, the English sentence "Is Hannah sick…
- Sentence (linguistics) In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" (a pangram)…
- Sentence-final particle Sentence-final particles, including modal particles and interactional particles, are minimal lexemes (words) that occur at the end of a sentence and that…
- Grammatical mood In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. In other words, it is the use of verbal inflections that…
- Imperative mood The imperative mood is a grammatical mood that forms a command or request. The imperative mood is used to demand or require that an action be performed…
- Tag question A tag question is a construction in which an interrogative element is added to a declarative or an imperative clause. The resulting speech act comprises…
- Affirmation and negation In linguistics and grammar, affirmation (abbreviated aff) and negation (neg) are ways in which grammar encodes positive and negative polarity into verb…