But taking a sentence totally out of context is a completely fair criticism. Got it.
That’s like saying a line from the football chart is a sentence. Sure it contains information, but that’s not the point. A sentence is a syntactic unit, not a semantic one.
The problem is, any definition of “syntax” you’re going to dig up will sooner or later invoke the concept of a “sentence”. You have to hammer it down somewhere, and CL does it the way I described.
I mean, he doesn’t rebut with an actual explanation that an English imperative sentence can be a complete sentence with a verb that is only implied.
His “I” example is somewhat analogous to answering a yes/no question with the single word “Yes” or “No”. Is that a sentence? In fact, Cecil accepted, earlier in the same column, the objection that a sentence must have a predicate.
ETA: So. Can “I.” be a complete sentence after all, with the implied verb “do”?
At this point, we might also mention, just for grins, the shortest possible English poem (that actually rhymes):
Caesar’s Remonstrance to Brutus
[indent]U
2?[/indent]
And also, English is a bit unusual in the way imperatives are formed. In some other languages (I am under the impression), it is rather regular – imperatives can be in the first, second, or third person, created with more-or-less normal style verb conjugations.
In English, the most common (second person singular or possibly plural) imperative is “You [verb]”, where “You” is usually implied. There is also a common first person plural imperative, expressed with the words “Let us”, as in “Let’s eat!”. That’s a rather weird way to create a verb form. It could also be done in the third person (singular or plural), as in “Let them eat cake!”
“O?” won’t do. “O” and “oh” aren’t the same word.
And, yes, “let” is the usual way to translate non-2nd-person imperatives into English.
When Hugo published Les Misérables, he was on holiday. After not hearing anything about its reception for a few days, Hugo sent a telegram to his publisher, reading, simply:
?
The publisher replied:
!
Complete nonsense, of course, though it’s repeated everywhere. The fact that everyone immediately understands the joke - and one reputed to have originated in France - indicates that language, not just English, is infinitely flexible. (So does the use of infinitely in the previous sentence.)
Any complete grammar has to accommodate these variations.
According the grammatical rules I learned in 5th grade, “No” doesn’t qualify, but “Go” and in context “I”, do qualify.
But what about the last example, the one with zero letters?
!
Is that a sentence, a sentence fragment or neither? What is it?
Descriptivists!
You rang?
Very close, though.
It would appear that “Oh” could be used wherever “O” is, but not the other way around.
Powers &8^]
I first heard this attributed to Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. I’ve heard it for a couple of different books over the years. I’d be curious as to the origins of the joke, whether anyone actually did any such reply - telegrams being charged by the word, it seems like it could have actually happened…
As to the shortest sentence, my vote is with (implied you, imperative) Go! I like the “I” answer, with the implied ‘am’ or ‘did’ or whatever, but speaking as just a layman in this field, to me it seems that an implied 2nd person imperative is pretty standard in English, whereas a reply of “I” in response to “Who?” is a very non-standard usage.
It is most certainly not “non-standard”. It is, in present-day English, somewhat uncommon.