Sentence (linguistics) - Definition and Overview

In linguistics, the sentence is a unit of language, characterised in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. For example, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." The shortest legal sentences in the English language are "I am" and "I do" - although with some bending of the rules, the imperative "Go!" can be considered a sentence, as could the word "I", carrying an unspoken verb "am" in response to a question such as "Who's in charge here?"

Traditionally, each sentence is regarded as having a subject, an object and a verb, even if one of these is implied. See grammar for more details. The objects that modify the noun phrase collectively form the predicate of a sentence.

In the English language, linguists classify sentences into one of four types:

1. Simple sentence
2. Compound sentence
3. Complex sentence
4. Compound-complex sentence