sentenceending

Sentence ending refers to the elements that signal the close of a sentence. In written language these are end punctuation marks, and in some languages there are dedicated particles or markers that attach to the final word to convey mood, questionhood, or emphasis. The concept covers both the punctuation used in scripts and the linguistic devices that come at the end of a clause or sentence in various languages.

Punctuation marks commonly used to end sentences include the period or full stop (.), the question mark (?), and the exclamation point (!). Many languages also employ additional marks or scripts for sentence termination, such as the Chinese full stop (。) and the Japanese full stop (。). Some languages, notably Spanish, use inverted punctuation at the beginning of questions or exclamations (¿ and ¡). In writing, ellipses (...) may indicate trailing or incomplete sentences, while abbreviations can complicate automatic sentence boundary detection.

In several languages, sentence-ending particles or endings attach to the final word to signal questions, politeness, mood, or aspect. For example, Japanese uses particles like か to mark questions, and ね or よ to convey confirmation or emphasis. Korean also employs sentence-ending endings such as 요 and while Korean endings express politeness and stance. Mandarin Chinese uses question endings like 吗 (ma) and various final particles to indicate mood or aspect, such as 吧 for suggestion or 呢 for continuation.

Prosody and pragmatics influence how a sentence ends in spoken language. Intonation patterns help listeners determine declarative versus interrogative or exclamative intent, and cross-linguistic differences mean that the same sentence can end with distinct tones or particles depending on language, formality, and discourse needs.

In computational and typographic contexts, recognizing sentence endings is essential for text processing, sentence tokenization, and punctuation handling. Abbreviations, numerals, and multi-script text pose challenges for accurately determining sentence boundaries.