THE THEORY OF THE SIMPLE SENTENCE

Sentential syntax is to be understood as a language component of our internal grammar, which allows us to generate, process and recognize grammatically correct sentences out of a limited storage of words without a moment’s hesitation. It’s a study of our computer-like ability in transformational-generative terms to generate, process and recognize acceptable or non-acceptable structures of the type The field is frozen. The leaves are dry. Life consists of propositions about life. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. There’s no sense in the last sentence, but we still recognize it as an English sentence, though lexico-semantical valency laws are destroyed. It’s recognizable as a poetic metaphor , the product of the XX century experimental verse. Sentential syntax is a study of syntactical modelling, communicative dynamism (the functional sentence perspective) of all kinds of sentences – simple and composite(compound and complex).

Though new revolutionary methods of parsing (грамматический разбор) have swept into prominence in the second half of the XX th century and shaken the foundations of Traditional grammar, traditional parsing into the main and secondary parts has not gone into oblivion; the subject and the predicate come back into view.

The present day sentential syntax takes advantage of basic achievements of traditionalists, structuralists, transformationalists, generativists, that is all sophistication of the modern syntactic research, innovatory techniques and procedures of analysis.