Lecture 27 statement, command, question, exclamation.doc

Lecture 27 Statement, Question, Command, Exclamation The sentence is the highest rank of grammatical construction. In terms of their communicative functions, sentences may be divided into four types: statement, question, command, and exclamation. 27.1 Statements In communication, statements (also known as declarative sentences) are chiefly used to state a fact or non-fact, that is, to affirm or negate something. Thus, statements may be divided into positive statements and negative statements. 1) Positive statements In a positive statement, there might be different degrees of certainty about the truth of the information imparted. It might be tinted by a tentative attitude which helps to soften the tone and make the utterance sound more polite. There are a number of expressions that are available for this purpose. These include such attitudinal disjuncts as I think, I guess, I suppose, I suspect, Im afraid, if Im not mistaken, if I might say so, if you please, if you dont mind, etc, eg: Teaching 16 hours a week, Im afraid, is too much for me. We have met before, if Im not mistaken. To reinforce a statement, another set of devices are available for use. These include emphrasizers, reinforcement tags, double negatives as well as rhetorical questions. A rhetorical question is essentially an emphatic construction, which is a question in form but a statement in meaning. A negative rhetorical question is equivalent to a reinforced positive statement, while a positive rhetorical question to a reinforced negation, eg: Many people will certainly lose their jobs. That was a trap, that was. That kind of result is not impossible. Isnt it lovely weather today? Who doesnt know that? One more device for reinforcement common in spoken language is the use of a stressed operator. The operator in a sentence is normally unstressed. If it receives nuclear stress, the effect is often to add exclamatory emphasis to the whole sentence, eg: . I am telling you the truth --- you must