Sentence words

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Sentence words (also called word sentences) are single words that form a full sentence, such as "Alas." and "Yes." and "No.". Henry Sweet described them as "a variety of words which have the peculiarity of always forming a sentence by themselves". J. M. Hoogvliet calls them "volzinwoorden". They were also noted by Georg von der Gabelentz. Wegener called them "Wortsätze".^[1][2]

Sweet gives sentences such as "Come!", "John!", "Alas!" as examples of sentence words, in addition to "Yes." and "No.". Gabelentz does not list "Yes." and "No." as sentence words, however.^[3][2]

Many sentence words have formed from a process of devaluation and semantic erosion. In addition to the various phrases that have devolved into the words for "yes" and "no" in various languages (which can be found discussed in detail in yes and no), these include expletive sentence words such as "Well!" and the French "Ben!" (a parallel to "Bien!").^[4]

However, not all word sentences suffer from this loss of lexical meaning. A subset of sentence words, which Fonagy calls "nominal phrases", exist that retain their lexical meaning. These exist in Uralic languages, and are the remainders of an archaic syntax wherein there were no explicit markers for nouns and verbs. An example of this is the Hungarian language "Fecske!", which transliterates as "Swallow!", but which has to be idiomatically translated with multiple words "Look! A swallow!" for rendering the proper meaning of the original, which to a native Hungarian speaker is neither elliptical nor emphatic, in English. Such nominal phrase word sentences occur in English as well, particularly in telegraphese or as the rôte questions that are posed to fill in form data (e.g. "Name?", "Age?").^[4]

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