276a. A sentence is a longer or shorter series of notions connected in such way that the subject, i.e. the person or thing spoken of, as being the chief word, and the predicate, or statement made regarding him or it, form its two essential and necessary elements, to which every other that it may also happen to contain is more or less closely attached. If one of these two members be wanting (as in an exclamation), we have a kind of incomplete, insufficient proposition. Even the simplest