Lecture 13. The Composite Sentences

The composite sentence, as different from the simple sentence, is formed by two or more predicative lines. Being a polypredicative construction, it expresses a complicated act of thought, i.e. an act of mental activity which falls into two or more intellectual efforts closely combined with one another.

Earlier grammarians in their prescriptive grammars didn't pay much attention to a sentence in their syntactic parts, they mostly described word-groups and didn't consider a sentence as a unit. The first to introduce the idea of tire sentence as a unit (the concept of the sentence) was Brightland (18th century). He defined the sentence as a unit consisting of one affirmation and a name and he distinguished a simple and a compound sentence: a simple - one name and one affirmation; a compound - more than one name and more than one affirmation.

Later the prescriptive and scientific grammars (the middle of the 19th century) introduced a very important innovation: the subdivision of the compound sentence into compound proper and a complex sentence. The term “composite" was introduced by Poutsma, thus we got the so-called the thrichotomic division of sentences into simple, compound and complex (together - the composite).

One of the usual approaches to a compound sentence is that it is a sentence, whose parts are independent. Each predicative unit in a composite sentence makes up a clause in it, so that a clause as part of a composite sentence corresponds to a separate sentence as part of a contextual sequence.

There are at least three ways helping to avoid the ambiguity concerning the fact that a compound sentence in fact is a number of sentences:

- some grammarians try to explain it by emphasizing the complete independence of clauses of a compound sentence and the ability of isolating each member of a compound sentence without any change of its meaning or intonation,

- other grammarians just employ new terms to express more exactly the grammatical peculiarity of the combinations of sentences: “double", “multiple" sentences;

- still others exclude the concept of a compound sentence from the structural classification of sentences.

The use of composite sentences, especially long and logically intricate ones, is characteristic of literary written speech rather than colloquial oral speech. This un-questionable fact is explained by the three reasons: one relating to the actual needs of expression; one relating to the possibilities of production; and one relating to the conditions of perception.

On the other hand, we must clearly understand that the composite sentence as such is part and parcel of the general syntactic system of language, and its use is an inalienable feature of any normal expression of human thought in intercourse. This is demonstrated by cases of composite sentences that could not be adequately reduced to the corresponding sets of separate simple sentences in their natural contexts.

That the composite sentence structure answers the special needs of written mode of lingual expression is quite evident.

Composite sentences display two principal types of construction: hypotaxis (subordination) and parataxis (coordination). By coordination the clauses are arranged as units of syntactically equal rank, i. с equipotently; by subordination, as units of unequal rank, one being categorially dominated by the other.

The means of combining clauses into a polypredicative sentence are divided into syndetic, i. e. conjunctional, and asyndetic, i. e. non-conjunctional. The great controversy going on among linguists about this division concerns the status of syndeton and asyndeton versus coordination and subordination. Namely, the question under consideration is whether or not syndeton and asyndeton equally express the two types of syntactic relations between clauses in a composite sentence.

As far as the complex sentence is concerned it is a sentence consisting of at least two parts: the main clause, which is more independent, and a subordinate clause, which depends on the main clause. But in some cases it's difficult to see which of the two is more dependent on the other. So a complex sentence is a sentence in which one or more members of the sentence are expressed by subject-predicate groups/clusters, the parts of the complex sentence are interdependent both semantically and grammatically.

What you say, must be true. - mutually dependent.

I say, you 're absolutely right. - the subordinate is more independent of the two. As far as the subordinate clauses there are two approaches to their classification. The first is based on the syntactic function of the clause. According to it the subordinates may be subject, object, predicative, attributive, adverbial (all of them are clauses). The second is based on the part of speech which the clauses represent or whose function they perform (in Curme’s grammar). Here we find:

- substantive clauses (subject, predicate, object);

- adjective clauses (attributive);

- adverbial clauses (adverbial);

But the idea of the omission of the conjunction expounded in its purest, classical form has already been demonstrated in linguistics as fallacious, since asyndetic connection of clauses is indisputably characterised by its own functional value; it is this specific value that vindicates and supports the very existence of asyndetic polypredication in the system of language.

It should be mentioned that English is rich in constructions built up around a certain non-finite form. Some grammarians consider them clauses too. Bryant names them verbids — verbid clauses.