THE SYNTAX OF SENTENCE ENDER

Abstract

How can one tell whether or not what he has heard, or read, is a sentence? When he hears an utterance coming to a stop, or when he sees a string of orthographic symbols being discontinued, on what basis does he know that the utterance or the string of symbols does or does not represent a sentence? What is there in an utterance, or in any other linguistic product, that lets one induce the knowledge that he has experienced an end of a sentence? A linguistic production is inherently linear and its syntactic characterization is possible only by defining the order, maintained among the syntactic . units that consttiute the particular producton. Syntactic characterization of a sentence is essentially a description of a set of relations showing which of any two unHs among those that constitute the sentence precedes, or follows, the other within the scope of the production in question.