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In linguistics, a sentence function refers to a speaker's purpose in uttering a specific sentence, phrase, or clause. Whether a listener is present or not is sometimes irrelevant. It answers the question: "Why has this been said?" The five basic sentence forms (or "structures") in English are the declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative and the optative. These correspond to the discourse functionsstatement, 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.
For instance, the following sentence has declarative form: from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/clauses/discours.htm)
You need some help
But when this is spoken with a rising intonation, it becomes a question:
You need some help?
Conversely, rhetorical questions have the form of an interrogative, but they are really statements:
Who cares? ( = I don't care)
The four main categories can be further specified as being either communicative or informative, although this is somewhat simplistic.
In linguistics, a sentencefunction refers to a speaker's purpose in uttering a specific sentence, phrase, or clause. Whether a listener is present or...
In grammar, sentence and clause structure, commonly known as sentence composition, is the classification of sentences based on the number and kind of...
propositional function or a predicate is a sentence expressed in a way that would assume the value of true or false, except that within the sentence there is...
the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences. Words that are not function words are called content...
truth of the sentence "John is Greek and John is happy" is a function of the meaning of "and", and the truth values of the atomic sentences "John is Greek"...
cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts...
and, for example, can be construed as a function that can apply to sentence meanings to create new sentences, and likewise for noun phrase meanings, verb...
function. On the other hand, modal logic is non-truth-functional. A logical connective is truth-functional if the truth-value of a compound sentence is...
characterized as being the kind of thing that declarative sentences denote. For instance the sentence "The sky is blue" denotes the proposition that the sky...
evaluation function, a grid-search algorithm can be utilized to automate hyperparameter optimization [citation needed]. A way of testing sentence encodings...
from" or "separated", part of a sentence, functioning as a sentence modifier (usually at the beginning or end of the sentence). It provides an additional...
truth value leads to a contradiction. If "this sentence is false" is true, then it is false, but the sentence states that it is false, and if it is false...
in the field. A modular view of sentence processing assumes that the stages involved in reading a sentencefunction independently as separate modules...
abstract syntax trees used in computer programming. Unlike Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrams used for teaching grammar, parse trees do not use distinct symbol...
mathematics, the trigonometric functions (also called circular functions, angle functions or goniometric functions) are real functions which relate an angle of...
States Federal Sentencing Guidelines are rules published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission that set out a uniform policy for sentencing individuals and...
A sentence word (also called a one-word sentence) is a single word that forms a full sentence. Henry Sweet described sentence words as 'an area under...
essentially function as a verbal question mark. Because of this, in Japanese use of the question mark is optional with か. Thus the same sentence could be...
called a sentence letter, sentential variable, or sentential letter) is an input variable (that can either be true or false) of a truth function. Propositional...
a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence." Tree-adjoining...
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