The Classification of Sentences and Clauses

Abstract

If you go into any grammar school and visit English classes of the upper grades, you will hear a certain classification of sentences employed-namely, into declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory-and insisted upon as of fundamental importance. It is one of the points in which students are most carefully drilled. This classification is found, in substance, in all the elementary English grammars in our schools; in the large English grammars of Sweet, Earle, Maetzner, and others; in all our American Latin grammars but one; in various English and German grammars of Latin; in various Greek grammars; in Maetzner's French grammar, Whitney's German grammar, in the recent Report of the English Committee on Grammatical Terminology, etc., etc. With a single exception, namely the Hale-Buck Latin Grammar, all books that give any scheme give this. The classification is over two thousand years old. It goes back to Aristotle,' whose scheme-a somewhat fuller one, but essentially the same-was: declarative, vocative, optative, interrogative, imperative. In spite of its venerable history,2 I believe, and have long taught, that the classification is unsound, and must be abandoned.