Abstract
The English sentence has always proved difficult to contextualise because of its amorphous structural elements and features. Defining a composite form for contextualising the structural and semantic features of the sentence has often become a herculean task for scholars in linguistics. The task for us in this study is harvesting the opinions of scholars on this with a view to coalescing their thoughts, finding the missing links, making useful recommendations and arriving at a logical conclusion. Indeed, some of the poignant areas which render the traditional opinions of scholars contestable are the restrictions placed on the functional features of the English sentence as only four, which are the directive, interrogative, declarative and exclamatory. Evidently, there is the fifth one which is termed the optative that is the good or fair wish sentence. Again, we discover that the directive or command sentence goes beyond the only ordinary ordering notion tagged with it by the traditional linguists. It is, therefore, noticed that some of such English sentences can, apart from being only command, be inviting e.g. Have a drink; Go with me, warning Mind your leg!; Face your work!, and suggesting Lets work together; Dont give it to him, among others.
All these are made succinct here.