[tlhIngan Hol] What is a sentence?

[SuStel]

On 6/9/2017 2:45 PM, qurgh lungqIj wrote:
> It seems that Okrand switches back and forth on this one. In TKD he 
> clearly defines them as two sentences and repeats that convention 
> multiple times throughout that section:

Oh sure. I'm not saying that an SAO isn't two sentences. It clearly is. 
I'm saying that it's a sentence composed of sentences. It's both one 
sentence and two. I'm not interested in what the "right" terminology is 
here, just whether SAOs as whole entities have the properties of sentences.

The exact properties of complex sentences of any given type are not 
revealed by making this statement, but it opens the possibility of 
things like attaching relative clauses to SAOs or adding adverbials, 
syntactic nouns, or time expressions to the front of them, and in all 
cases referring to the SAO as a whole, rather than just one part of it. 
For instance, Captain Klaa's utterance *reH DIvI' Duj vISuv vIneH* /I've 
always wanted to fight a Federation ship/ becomes perfectly reasonable 
without any special grammatical exceptions if we simply look at it as 
*reH [DIvI' Duj vISuv vIneH],* where the brackets delineate a sentence, 
not just a "construction." You can put adverbials at the beginning of 
sentences and other verbal clauses. If you can't call that a sentence, 
you have to explain why you can add *reH* to the front of it, or else 
you've got *[reH DIvI' Duj vISuv] [vIneH]*/I want to always fight a 
Federation ship,/ where the brackets delineate the first and second 
sentences, and the meaning is wrong.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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