Timeline for Forming valid one word sentences
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
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| Oct 22, 2015 at 13:23 | comment | added | Jay | The issue is not an arbitrary rule that a sentence must contain at least 14 letters or some such, but rather that a sentence must contain a subject and a verb. If it has no subject, then who is doing the action? If it has no verb, then what are they doing? Imperatives can be just one word because the subject is an implied "you". A very long string of words could fail this test, like "The large gray house on the top of the hill with flowers all around and a long winding driveway" is not a complete sentence because it has no verb. | |
| Jan 23, 2013 at 16:21 | comment | added | RegDwigнt | This answer is circular reasoning. Of course a one-word sentence is not a sentence if you define a sentence as something that cannot be a single word. By way of exaggeration, I might as well define a sentence as something that includes a 24-letter loanword from Russian, in which case nothing on this page is a sentence. But that's pointless. The question is not what definition you can make up, but how useful it is, who does use it at all, and what happens to all the other stuff that doesn't meet it. (If "Help!" is not a sentence, what is it?) | |
| S Jan 23, 2013 at 15:34 | review | Late answers | |||
| Jan 23, 2013 at 16:21 | |||||
| S Jan 23, 2013 at 15:34 | review | First posts | |||
| Jan 23, 2013 at 16:06 | |||||
| Jan 23, 2013 at 15:32 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | What (and why) does being elliptical invalidate 'outside of direct speech' but not in spoken English? I'd agree that a sentence is defined as containing a subject and a main verb at the bare minimum, but 'sentence substitutes', while obviously not being sentences, are widely accepted as not 'being ungrammatical'. See grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/sentfragterm.htm : Though in traditional grammar sentence fragments are usually treated as grammatical errors, they are commonly used by professional writers to create emphasis or particular stylistic effects , and Nordquist's 'Crots' link. | |
| Jan 23, 2013 at 15:18 | history | answered | user36299 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |