Kokonaissanan

Kokonaissanan is a theoretical construct used in linguistic discussions of sentence scope and truth-conditional semantics, particularly in studies of embedded clauses and constructed languages. It refers to the maximal syntactic and semantic unit that yields a single truth-conditional proposition for a given sentence.

Etymology: The term is a coined, pseudo-Finnish compound formed from kokonainen (whole) and sana (word), with the genitive suffix -n, chosen to evoke the sense of “the whole sentence’s word.” The coinage is used mainly in theoretical contexts and has no independent lexical status in natural languages.

Definition and scope: A kokonaissanan includes the main clause and any subordinate clauses that contribute to the sentence’s truth conditions. In sentences with multiple layers of embedding, the kokonaissanan is the largest unit that remains semantically coherent as a single proposition. It is distinct from the core proposition (the minimal predicate) and from discourse-level particles or markers that do not alter the proposition’s content. Some frameworks mark the boundaries of a kokonaissanan with specific punctuation or prosodic cues in experimental data.

Usage and status: Kokonaissanan is mainly used in theoretical work and classroom exercises on scope, semantics, and machine translation for constructed languages. It is not widely adopted in standard descriptive linguistics of natural languages, and there is no consensus on its formal definition across frameworks.