Grammar – What is a Sentence?

So much, then, for the individual parts of speech. In isolation they mean little. Only when words form part of a phrase or sentence do they begin to serve a proper communicative purpose.
The best way to thing of a sentence is as a word or string of words that makes sense on its own – that is, as a complete grammatical unit. So Hello, and Well I never!, and Easy come, easy go, and Bother it! are sentences. So too is I can, in response to the question Who can speak French? However, these are hardly typical sentences.
A ‘normal’ sentence consists of one or more clauses. These are like mini-sentences, mostly with a main verb plus all the other constituents attached to it.
Take this sentence:
When I’d got back from work and was having a shower, my wife said that she’d seen just the curtains that we’d been looking for.
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