Sentence Fragments

3 Key excerpts on "Sentence Fragments"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  English: An Essential Grammar

  • Gerald Nelson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Grammatically complete sentences typically contain at least a verb. However, a great deal of communication, especially in speech, consists of incomplete sentences or fragments. In conversation, for instance, speakers often omit the Subject, especially when the understood Subject is I : Must set my alarm clock tonight. Can’t seem to concentrate today. Fragments are also commonly used in response to questions: Speaker A : What did you buy for Sandra? Speaker B : A gold necklace. Speaker B’s utterance is a fragment, which we interpret in the same way as the complete sentence I bought a gold necklace for Sandra, where it functions as Direct Object. Newspaper headlines are often highly compressed, so that complete sentences are reduced to fragments: Labour Party in Expenses Scandal This fragment has no verb, but we interpret it as the complete sentence The Labour Party is involved in an expenses scandal. We refer to these as fragments because we can interpret them in the same way as grammatically complete sentences. Only some of the sentence elements are missing. Non-sentences have no sentence structure at all, and they generally occur without any surrounding context

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  eBook - ePub

  Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • David Hornsby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 ). For linguists, syntax means the study of the set of rules governing the way that morphemes, words, clauses and phrases are used to form sentences in any given language.

  However, the distinction between ‘word-level’ and ‘sentence-level’ grammar is far from watertight, and there is a considerable grey area between the two. Linguists sometimes refer to morphosyntax when describing phenomena which straddle both levels: grammatical gender, for example, often manifests itself at word level in inflection, but may also affect relations between items within a sentence in the case of the syntactic phenomenon of agreement (or concord).

  Subjects and predicates

  Calling syntax ‘the grammar of sentences’ is all very well, but sentences prove as difficult to define as ‘words’ did in the previous chapter. We are used, in literate societies with a written-language bias, to thinking of a sentence as something that generally begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, but this does not get us very far. A traditional definition of a sentence as ‘the expression of a complete thought’ is not helpful either: are elderberry wine, exactly or good! not ‘complete thoughts’? In traditional grammar, sentences were required to have a subject and a predicate, i.e. something we are talking about (the subject) and then something said about it (the predicate):

  1  Dinosaurs existed.

  2  Samantha is preparing for her bar examinations.

  3  Paul gave a tip to the waiter.

  Identifying the subject in Latin, Russian or Polish would be straightforward, because the nouns would be case-marked, i.e. inflected according to their function in the sentence. This is no longer true of English (though it used to be), but pronouns – with the exception of third-person singular it – do retain case-marked forms, so we can apply a substitution test. Thus in the list above, the subjects are Dinosaurs, Samantha and Paul, because they alone can be replaced by subject (or nominative) forms (they, she and he

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  eBook - ePub

  Years 6-10 Literacy For Students

  • (Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  Having sentences of different lengths adds to the rhythm of what you write, which creates interest for your reader. Long sentences, with a mixture of subordinated ideas and coordinated elements (like this sentence) can slow down the pace of a piece of writing so that descriptions mimic the way our eyes or a movie camera move across a scene. Single idea sentences make a strong statement.

  Alternate between long and short sentences. If you find you have written a string of long sentences, you can create more variety by cutting out wordy and repetitive phrases. You can also break some into shorter sentences. Be aware, however, that too many short sentences in a row can make your writing sound jerky and disconnected.

  Use long sentences where you need to convey a lot of information or you want to describe something in detail. Use short sentences to make important points.

  Considering Sentence Fragments

  A sentence is not fully formed if it consists of only a phrase or a dependent clause. These are sometimes called Sentence Fragments. Here are some sentence fragment examples:

  • Entering the room
  • Because Shelley was so good at English
  • Setsuko, who had lost her wallet
  • As if by magic

  Now here are fully formed sentences based on these fragments:

  • Entering the room, she turned on the light.
  • Because Shelley was so good at English, she won the prize.
  • Setsuko, who had lost her wallet, could not catch the train home.
  • The book rose into the air, as if by magic.

  Fragmented subject–verb pair

  Listen to a conversation. People rarely speak in complete sentences. Consider the following: Where did you get that mud cake? (complete sentence)

  From the cafe next door. (fragment: no subject or verb; needs It came from the cafe next door to be complete)

  Looks delicious. (fragment: no subject; needs It looks delicious)

  Sentence Fragments often occur because the sentence doesn’t have a complete subject–verb pair. (Remember them? Refer to ‘You Complete Me: Subject and Verb Pairs’, earlier in this chapter, for the details.)

  Fragmented ideas

  Another common type of incomplete sentence occurs when only part of an idea is communicated. If the first word is something like and, but or because

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