Sentencefinal

Sentencefinal (often written sentence-final) denotes the position at the end of a sentence and is used to describe phonological, morphological, syntactic, prosodic, and orthographic phenomena that occur there. The term applies across languages to elements and processes that are conditioned by clause or sentence boundaries.

Phonologically and prosodically, the sentence-final position is associated with distinctive patterns such as boundary tones, intonational contours, and phrase-final lengthening. Many languages show preboundary lengthening and final strengthening of segments; others exhibit final devoicing of obstruents (for example German and Dutch). Sentence-final intonation often distinguishes speech acts: falling contours commonly mark declaratives, rising contours are associated with yes–no questions or uptalk variants, and specialized boundary tones can signal continuation or surprise.

Morphological and syntactic phenomena include sentence-final particles and clitics that mark modality, politeness, focus, interrogation, or evidentiality. Examples include Japanese and Korean sentence-final particles that encode speaker stance, and Mandarin sentence-final particles such as 吗 (ma) for questions and 吧 (ba) for suggestions. In verb-final (SOV) languages, the main verb regularly occupies the clause-final position.

Orthographically, sentence-final punctuation (period, question mark, exclamation point, ellipsis) signals sentence boundaries and intonation types in written language. In discourse, sentence-final elements often carry pragmatic weight, helping to manage turn-taking, indicate speaker attitude, and package information for the hearer.