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There is more of a problem in defining a sentence than we might suppose. Certainly it was good to be taught as little children that a sentence should have a verb. Ordinarily we might expect a subject too. Henry Fowler in Modern English Usage (1926) wrote, ‘Sentence, in grammar, means a set of words complete in itself, having either expressed or understood in it a subject and a predicate, and conveying a statement or question or command or exclamation.’
‘Don’t touch’ would be for Fowler an elliptical sentence, since its subject is not expressed nor is any predicate. Interestingly, Fowler regards as two sentences an example like, ‘You commanded and I obeyed.’ Another thing we were probably taught is that a sentence should not begin with and. But then we discovered that in the admired prose of the King James Bible, sentence after sentence begins with and. As for verbless sentences, much depends on context. They are often used in dialogue. In response to questions, an answer may simply be ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, words which perform a grammatical function that had to be expressed less neatly in Latin. But the answer might well be ‘Blue’ or ‘Hot’. Moreover, prose that resembles oral speech, either as dialogue or as monologue, even distantly, is often improved by the use of verbless sentences. Here is a random bit from Elizabeth Longford: ‘This was the kind of woman Queen Victoria truly admired: one with spirit who was also kind to the servants. “High tone” without “John Bullism”.’ Indeed.
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