How can I recognise English declarative sentences?

While there may be four sentence functions to choose from, this chapter focuses solely on the declarative sentence – which is the most common type of sentence function available to a speaker and writer. Because declarative sentences are so common, these sentences are often considered to be the default structure (the base form) from which all other sentence functions are modified and created.

A type of informative sentence, the simplest explanation of the function of a declarative is that these sentences provide an idea or statement for the primary intention of transferring information between speaker (or writer) and listener (or reader). These ideas and statements may be objective or subjective on the part of the utterer, and they may also be true or false. We’ve provided some examples for you below to see the many different types of declarative sentence in context.

Academic Examples

– One example of this can be found in the Warsaw Pact.

– My university has over 10,000 students and 600 tutors.

– Smith (2016) suggests that student attendance is improving every year.

– Blended Learning is defined as the process of teaching and learning online.

– Because it’s so important, students need to focus in foundation-year programmes.

What can be seen from these examples is that declarative sentences can have a variety of different internal structures (syntax) and may be used to provide facts, opinions, arguments, titles, headings, definitions and more. Indeed, declarative sentences may be formed of any simple, compound, complex and compound complex structure, and may therefore contain any number of clauses.

Recognising Declaratives

There are three general indicators of declaratives that can help you in recognising and using this sentence type in your own speech or writing. Firstly, declaratives are always completed with a full stop (.). Secondly, declaratives follow the usual English word order, which is subject-verb-object. And finally, declaratives almost always require a clear and fronted subject for their structure to be grammatical.

Having discussed the structures and rules of declarative sentence functions, Chapter 3 will now introduce you to the complexities of interrogative sentences.