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embers @embers@chaos.social
1mo
What even defines the barrier of a sentence? Are these 1 or 2 sentences:

"We selected the second car: we figured we could sell it if we didn't like it."
"It was storming; an umbrella would have been ripped from my hands."
"He said, "I don't need that.""
""I don't need that," he said, "it would clutter my workshop.""

What the fuck is a sentence?

(This isn't a purely academic endeavor, either. Many laws reference other laws by "§12a sentence 2", which requires counting the sentences in §12a)
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sodiboo pride_heart @sodiboo@gaysex.cloud
1mo
@embers typically, a sentence is roughly "any sequence of words and punctuation terminated by one of ?!."; it's arbitrary and a better way to count units of meaning in those examples is by counting the amount of clauses. a clause contains just one predicate; one "action", one "thing". a sentence can be built with several independent clauses using a comma splice, it can be built with dependent clauses using prepositions, quotes, and regular commas.

i think all your examples are one sentence each, but the quotes in example 3 and 4 also qualify as sentences in their own right. but they do not add to the sentence count of the overall example. (example 4 contains 3 distinct sentences but it is 1 sentence long)

i would say that, for the purposes of a legal text, surely /(?<^|[.!?] )[^.!?]*[.!?]/ would match all sentences (assuming it has no inline quotes of course, but you can't make a regex for that)
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embers @embers@chaos.social
1mo
@sodiboo actually, legal texts (in Germany) often contain the truly horrifying sentence structure [clause]: [dotted list, their elements often consisting of multiple fully qualified sentences in their own right]. The list elements often contain full-stops. And this structure may even be recursive to a yet to be discovered length (farthest I've seen so far is 2). This means that sentences in legal texts are at least context free.
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embers @embers@chaos.social
1mo
@sodiboo additionally, speech quotes can contain question marks despite them (imo) not constituting a sentence barrier.

"Is this it?" she exclaimed, "This must be how we're going to die."
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sodiboo pride_heart @sodiboo@gaysex.cloud
1mo
@embers

in this sentence construction:

"I don't need that," he said, "it would clutter my workshop."

i think I don't need that, is a sentence ending in a comma.

you could argue it's a comma splice. I don't need that, it would clutter my workshop.

but i think that the comma only exists as a contextual replacement for a sentence terminator, because there isn't meant to be a long pause after this sentence. the pause gets filled in with he said when pronouncing the two quoted sentences, and in the quotes there is a normal sentence stop, but in the full text containing the quotes, this is one sentence, so the comma is there to indicate the cadence of that full sentence. because we're reading the quoteful text, not the quoted text.
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sodiboo pride_heart @sodiboo@gaysex.cloud
1mo
@embers this further proves the point i think everyone already agrees on. that language is a social construct, the rules are fake, and asking "what is a sentence" is almost as bad as asking "what is a species". it's difficult to classify how many ways we have invented to classify species. but at least for sentences, [the first paragraph of Wikipedia tells you just two ways to classify sentences](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics)>). i guess i'm a functional linguist. i didn't know it transferred over from my coding knowledge. though i guess coding is just a very esoteric form of constructed linguistics.
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Jen, Resident Yote @Jenetrix@shrimp.creatures.club
1mo
@sodiboo @embers my "language is dictated by use" ass reading this thread with popcorn. /lh
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