• Sentence Boundaries Practice
• Sentence Boundaries Definition
• Sentence Boundaries Pdf

• A structure that 'completes' the sentence. The term includes those slots in the predicate that complete the verb: direct object, indirect object, subject complement, and object complement. Certain adjectives also have complements-dauses and phrases that pattern with them: 'I -was certain that he would come'; 'I was afraid to go.
• Detect the presence or absence of a pattern in a string. Source: R/detect.r. String: Input vector. Either a character vector, or something coercible to one. Pattern: Pattern to look for. The default interpretation is a. Match character, word, line and sentence boundaries with boundary. An empty pattern, ', is equivalent.

In writing, word boundaries are conventionally represented by spaces between words. In speech, word boundaries are determined in various ways, as discussed below.

Someone with healthy boundaries can say “no” when they want to, but they are also comfortable opening themselves up to intimacy and close relationships. The Setting Boundaries worksheet will help teach your clients to set healthy boundaries by covering language for speaking assertively, boundary-setting tips, examples, and practice exercises.

Related Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• Assimilation and Dissimilation
• Metanalysis
• Morpheme and Phoneme
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Segment and Suprasegmental
• Slip of the Ear

Examples of Word Boundaries

• 'When I was very young, my mother scolded me for flatulating by saying, 'Johnny, who made an odor?' I misheard her euphemism as 'who made a motor?' For days I ran around the house amusing myself with those delicious words.' (John B. Lee, Building Bicycles in the Dark: A Practical Guide on How to Write. Black Moss Press, 2001
• 'I could have sworn I heard on the news that the Chinese were producing new trombones. No, it was neutron bombs.' (Doug Stone, quoted by Rosemarie Jarski in Dim Wit: The Funniest, Stupidest Things Ever Said. Ebury, 2008
• 'As far as input processing is concerned, we may also recognize slips of the ear, as when we start to hear a particular sequence and then realize that we have misperceived it in some way; e.g. perceiving the ambulance at the start of the yam balanced delicately on the top . . ..' (Michael Garman, Psycholinguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2000

Word Recognition

• 'The usual criterion for word recognition is that suggested by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who defined a word as 'a minimal free form.' . . .
• 'The concept of a word as 'a minimal free form' suggests two important things about words. First, their ability to stand on their own as isolates. This is reflected in the space which surrounds a word in its orthographical form. And secondly, their internal integrity, or cohesion, as units. If we move a word around in a sentence, whether spoken or written, we have to move the whole word or none of it--we cannot move part of a word.'
  (Geoffrey Finch, Linguistic Terms, and Concepts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
• '[T]he great majority of English nouns begins with a stressedsyllable. Listeners use this expectation about the structure of English and partition the continuous speech stream employing stressed syllables.'
  (Z.S. Bond, 'Slips of the Ear.' The Handbook of Speech Perception, ed. by David Pisoni and Robert Remez. Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

Tests of Word Identification

• Potential pause: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to 'repeat it very slowly, with pauses.' The pauses will tend to fall between words, and not within words. For example, the / three / little / pigs / went / to / market. . . .
• Indivisibility: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to 'add extra words' to it. The extra item will be added between the words and not within them. For example, the pig went to market might become the big pig once went straight to the market. . . .
• Phonetic boundaries: It is sometimes possible to tell from the sound of a word where it begins or ends. In Welsh, for example, long words generally have their stress on the penultimate syllable . . .. But there are many exceptions to such rules.
• Semantic units: In the sentence Dog bites vicar, there are plainly three units of meaning, and each unit corresponds to a word. But language is often not as neat as this. In I switched on the light, the has little clear 'meaning,' and the single action of 'switching on' involves two words.​
  (Adapted from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd ed., by David Crystal. Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Explicit Segmentation

• '[E]xperiments in English have suggested that listeners segment speech at strong syllable onsets. For example, finding a real word in a spoken nonsense sequence is hard if the word is spread over two strong syllables (e.g., mint in [mǀntef]) but easier if the word is spread over a strong and a following weak syllable (e.g., mint in [mǀntəf]; Cutler & Norris, 1988).
  The proposed explanation for this is that listeners divide the former sequence at the onset of the second strong syllable, so that detecting the embedded word requires recombination of speech material across a segmentation point, while the latter sequence offers no such obstacles to embedded word detection as the non-initial syllable is weak and so the sequence is simply not divided.
  Similarly, when English speakers make slips of the ear that involve mistakes in word boundary placement, they tend most often to insert boundaries before strong syllables (e.g., hearing by loose analogy as by Luce and Allergy) or delete boundaries before weak syllables (e.g., hearing how big is it? as how bigoted?; Cutler & Butterfield, 1992).
  These findings prompted the proposal of the Metrical Segmentation Strategy for English (Cutler & Norris, 1988; Cutler, 1990), whereby listeners are assumed to segment speech at strong syllable onsets because they operate on the assumption, justified by distributional patterns in the input, that strong syllables are highly likely to signal the onset of lexical words. . . .
  Explicit segmentation has the strong theoretical advantage that it offers a solution to the word boundary problem both for the adult and for the infant listener. . . .
  'Together these strands of evidence motivate the claim that the explicit segmentation procedures used by adult listeners may in fact have their origin in the infant's exploitation of
  rhythmic structure to solve the initial word boundary problem.'​
  (Anne Cutler, 'Prosody and the Word Boundary Problem.' Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition, ed. by James L. Morgan and Katherine Demuth. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996)

In terms of structure, sentences can be classified in four ways:

• Simple: one independent clause
• Compound: at least two independent clauses
• Complex: an independent clause and at least one dependent clause
• Compound-complex: two or more independent clauses and at least one dependent clause

This exercise will give you practice in identifying these four sentence structures.

Instructions

Sentence Boundaries Practice

The sentences in this exercise have been adapted from poems in two books by Shel Silverstein: 'Where the Sidewalk Ends' and 'Falling Up.' Identify each of the following sentences as simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex. When you're done, compare your responses to the correct answers listed below. The name of the poem from which the example is taken is listed in parentheses after each sentence.

Sentence Boundaries Definition

1. I made an airplane out of stone. ('Stone Airplane')
2. I put a piece of cantaloupe underneath the microscope. ('Nope')
3. Oaties stay oaty, and Wheat Chex stay floaty, and nothing can take the puff out of Puffed Rice. ('Cereal')
4. While fishing in the blue lagoon, I caught a lovely silverfish. ('The Silver Fish')
5. They say if you step on a crack, you will break your mother's back. ('Sidewalking')
6. They just had a contest for scariest mask, and I was the wild and daring one who won the contest for scariest mask—and (sob) I'm not even wearing one. ('Best Mask?')
7. My voice was raspy, rough, and cracked. ('Little Hoarse')
8. I opened my eyes and looked up at the rain, and it dripped in my head and flowed into my brain. ('Rain')
9. They say that once in Zanzibar a boy stuck out his tongue so far that it reached the heavens and touched a star, which burned him rather badly. ('The Tongue Sticker-Outer')
10. I'm going to Camp Wonderful beside Lake Paradise across from Blissful Mountain in the Valley of the Nice. ('Camp Wonderful')
11. I joke with the bats and have intimate chats with the cooties who crawl through my hair ('The Dirtiest Man in the World')
12. The animals snarled and screeched and growled and whinnied and whimpered and hooted and howled and gobbled up the whole ice cream stand. ('Ice Cream Stop')
13. The antlers of a standing moose, as everybody knows, are just the perfect place to hang your wet and drippy clothes. ('A Use for a Moose')
14. We'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow, and we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go. ('Where the Sidewalk Ends')
15. If I had a brontosaurus, I would name him Horace or Morris. ('If I Had a Brontosaurus')
16. I am writing these poems from inside a lion, and it's rather dark in here. ('It's Dark in Here')
17. A piece of sky broke off and fell through the crack in the ceiling right into my soup. ('Sky Seasoning')
18. The grungy, grumpy, grouchy Giant grew tired of his frowny pout and hired me and Lee to lift the corners of his crumblin' mouth. ('The Smile Makers')
19. If you were only one inch tall, you'd ride a worm to school. ('One Inch Tall')
20. The traffic light simply would not turn green, so the people stopped to wait as the traffic rolled and the wind blew cold, and the hour grew dark and late. ('Traffic Light')

Answers

Sentence Boundaries Pdf

1. simple
2. simple
3. compound
4. complex
5. complex
6. compound-complex
7. simple
8. compound
9. complex
10. simple
11. complex
12. simple
13. complex
14. compound-complex
15. complex
16. compound
17. simple
18. simple
19. complex
20. compound-complex