What are the four sentence functions in English?
This is the first of five chapters about Sentence Functions. To complete this reader, read each chapter carefully and then unlock and complete our materials to check your understanding.
– Introduce the concept of sentence functions
– Divide sentence functions into four types
– Provide examples of each type to guide the learner
Chapter 1: What are the four sentence functions in English?
Chapter 2: How can I recognise English declarative sentences?
Chapter 3: How can I recognise English interrogative sentences?
Chapter 4: How can I recognise English imperative sentences?
Chapter 5: How can I recognise English exclamatory sentences?
Chapter 1
To have an advanced control over your sentences in English, you’ll need to be able to understand, recognise and use a variety of sentence clauses, structures and functions. The following five chapters deal with the four different types of sentence function in English, but before naming these four types let’s first take a look at some example sentences. What do you notice about how these four sentences function?
Hopefully upon careful inspection you noticed that each sentence in these examples performs a different function. For example, some sentences act as statements and some as questions, while the purpose of others may be to command or exclaim something. These four different purposes are the essence of sentence functions.
What you should have also noticed in these examples is that to create these different functions, each sentence must undergo changes to its word order, its verb form, which auxiliaries or particles it requires, its punctuation, and even how it’s intonated when being delivered by a speaker. Before looking more closely at each of these four types of sentence functions, it’s important to categorise these functions in two ways, which are informative and communicative sentences.
1. Informative Sentence Functions
There are two different sentence functions which can be considered as being informative, and these are declarative and interrogative sentences. These sentences function for the benefit of both the speaker and the listener, and unlike communicative sentence functions, both declarative and interrogative sentences are cooperative, considered, and are able to discuss actions or ideas in the past and future as well as the now. The flexibility of informative sentence functions is therefore what mostly separates human language from animal communication.
2. Communicative Sentence Functions
Much like informative sentence functions, communicative sentences may also be split into two types, and these are exclamatory and imperative functions. Unlike informative sentences however, communicative sentences are not particularly intended to open a dialogue between speaker and listener; these sentences function primarily for the speaker’s purposes, needs and wants.
Communicative sentences tend to be less considered and more emotional in nature than the informative type, being spoken out of frustration or confusion for example. Such expressions are therefore more primitive in nature, and are generally only able to describe situations happening in the now.
Now that you’ve been introduced to the four basic sentence functions and their two major categorisations, the next step is to look at each of these functions in careful detail to see how to use and recognise them in an academic context.
Downloadables
Once you’ve completed all five chapters about sentence functions, you might also wish to download our beginner, intermediate and advanced worksheets to test your progress or print for your students. These professional PDF worksheets can be easily accessed for only a few Academic Marks.
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