General characteristics of the sentence. Sentence – proposition – utterance.
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. The sentence is a unit of language while the utterance is a unit of speech.
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).
The utterance as opposed to the sentence is the unit of speech. The
main categories of the utterance from the point of view of its informative structure are considered to be the theme and the rheme.
The most essential features of the sentence as a linguistic unit are:
a) its structural characteristics – subject-predicate relations (primary predication)
b) its semantic characteristics – it refers to some fact in the objective reality. It is represented in the language through a conceptual reality:
