2 The structural scheme of the sentence. The elementary sentence.
There are no structural limits for increasing the size of the sentence and expanding its structure, however, the
opposite procedure has a specific limit, the limit being the elementary sentence. Omission of some element of the
elementary sentence destroys it as a structural and semantic unit.
Thus, the sentence “A low rumbling sound had broken the silence around them” (from Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer’s Stone) can be made more complicated by adding new attributes, introducing dependent clauses, inserting
modal words, etc. The process will have no end. However, omission of elements that do not affect the structural and
semantic completeness of the sentence can go on until it meets a certain limit. Such limit for the sentence under
consideration is “A sound had broken the silence”. It realizes the syntactic structure made up by the subject + a
simple predicate expressed by a verb of non-prepositional directivity + a direct object.
The structural scheme of the sentence is a sentence structure minimal by its composition and simplest by
grammatical and semantic structure. A construction built according to a structural scheme and realizing all of its
components is called an elementary sentence. Prof. Pocheptsov lists some structural schemes for verbal sentences and
examples of corresponding elementary sentences:
Structural schemes Elementary sentences
Subject - predicate expressed by a verb of
nondirected action (Active Voice)
Subject - predicate expressed by a verb of
non- prepositional-object directivity (Active
Voice)
- direct object
Subject - predicate expressed by a verb
requiring two non-prepositional objects: object
of addressee and object of patient (Active
voice) - non-prepositional object of addressee
- non-prepositional object of patient
Pages rustle. (S. Bedford)
Mor was enjoying the port.
(I. Murdoch)
'I've taught him that.' (J. Galsworthy)
Subject - predicate expressed by a verb of
spatial directivity (Active Voice) - adverbial
modifier of place
The Judge is in the chair. (S. Bedford)
Subject - predicate expressed by a verb of That was long ago. (P. Abrahams)
temporal directivity (Active Voice) - adverbial
modifier of time
Subject - predicate expressed by a verb of
non-
They had been seized. (H.G. Wells)
prepositional object directivity (Passive
Voice)
The set of structural schemes specific to every language is the initial basis for building actual sentences as facts of
speech.
One point that should be mentioned here is the status of passive sentences. The question is whether they should be
included into the set of structural schemes as active sentences or whether they should be regarded as secondary
constructions built on the basis of active sentences. As it has been shown by psycholinguistic experiments, passive
sentences do not appear in actual speech as results of transforming active sentences. Besides that, there are some
passive sentences that do not have corresponding active sentences (eg. I was bom in France). Therefore, a passive
sentence is not a derivative of an active one but an independent syntactical phenomenon.
The total number of structural schemes in a language is a few dozens of
units
