The syntactical level has two level units as well:
the word-group – the dependent syntactic unit;
the sentence – the main communicative unit.
The supersyntactical level has the text as its level unit.
The relation between a unit and other units (inner relations between units). No unit can be used independently; it serves as an element in the system of other units. This kind of meaning is called syntactic. Formal relation of units to one another is studied by syntactics (or syntax). Only inner (syntactic) relations between linguistic units served the basis for linguistic analysis while the reference of words to the objective reality and language users were actually not considered
24) Sentence. Definition of the sentence. Different views and their consistency.
It is rather difficult to define the sentence as it is connected with many lingual and extra lingual aspects – logical, psychological and philosophical. We will just stick to one of them - according to academician G.Pocheptsov, the sentence is the central syntactic construction used as the minimal communicative unit that has its primary predication, actualises a definite structural scheme and possesses definite intonation characteristics. This definition works only in case we do not take into account the difference between the sentence and the utterance. The distinction between the sentence and the utterance is of fundamental importance because the sentence is an abstract theoretical entity defined within the theory of grammar while the utterance is the actual use of the sentence. In other words, the sentence is a unit of language while the utterance is a unit of speech.The most essential features of the sentence as a linguistic unit are a) its structural characteristics – subject-predicate relations (primary predication), and b) its semantic characteristics – it refers to some fact in the objective reality. It is represented in the language through a conceptual reality We may define the proposition as the main predicative form of thought. Basic predicative meanings of the typical English sentence are expressed by the finite verb that is immediately connected with the subject of the sentence (primary predication).To sum it up, the sentence is a syntactic level unit, it is a predicative language unit which is a lingual representation of predicative thought (proposition).
