November 2, 2017 Life Sentence The Laws of Simple Sentences By Jeff Dolven In our new eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven will take apart and put back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week. Tom Toro will illustrate each sentence Dolven chooses. Read earlier installments of Life Sentence here. Image © Tom Toro A sentence has to be complete to be a sentence. It also has to be correct. “The trees wave.” That will certainly do: it has a subject and a predicate, a simple arrangement and a simple image. The grammarians’ demand for formal completeness dates back only to the middle of the seventeenth century, and so it is much younger than the ancient idea of a complete thought. The syntactic pattern underneath is older than both, and most linguists today take it to be the activation of a language faculty that has evolved over tens of thousands of years. That there is a law in this sentence, wherever it lies, is apparent any time we try to break it. “The trees”: is that a sentence? No. We are left hanging, wondering what the trees are or do or suffer. How about “Wave”? No, if it is supposed to be an indicative verb, what the trees do. (Yes, however, if it is an imperative, predicate to the implied subject “you.” No again, if it is a noun.) Read More
October 26, 2017 Life Sentence The Complete Sentence By Jeff Dolven In our new eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven will take apart and put back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week. Tom Toro will illustrate each sentence Dolven chooses. Image © Tom Toro What is a sentence? But that is such a formal question. How about, what is a sentence for? Less formal, perhaps, but obviously impossible to answer, for sheer variety. There may be some human purposes that don’t find their way into sentences, but writers keep trying, and for any limit we experience there may be a sentence in waiting and a writer to try it. Nonetheless, embarking on what will be a set of eight meditations on the sentence—what it is, what it can be for or about—I’ll propose one purpose that all sentences have in common. The purpose of a sentence is to end. If this is a property of all sentences, any ought to do for an example, but here is one particularly determined to be done with itself: 1 The world is everything that is the case. It comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as translated from German into English by C. K. Ogden in 1922. Beginning, as it does, with a capital letter (let’s ignore the number for the moment), and ending with a period, it advertises its own completeness. The completeness is grammatical: there is a subject and a verb, the minimum conditions, then a predicate nominative, and then a simple relative clause. It is also complete rhetorically, with the double “is” almost suggesting a palindrome, folding neatly in the middle. You could just about read it backward as well as forward. That wouldn’t be a good idea logically, but it asserts a certain self-containedness, a certain autonomy, which a sentence is supposed to have. Read More