Beyond the Sentence

Abstract

In modern linguistics, the sentence has often been described as the largest grammatical units, from the point of view of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This is because grammatical units are ranked with the sentence occupying the apex; and the morpheme occupying the bottom of the grammatical ladder. Before the sentence comes the clause; and after the morpheme is the word. The group or what is traditionally called the phrase is the median grammatical unit. However, since we usually talk in larger units, even above the sentence, the question remains: what is beyond the sentence? In this paper, an attempt is made to answer that question.