19.

Zoom out. Ron Silliman claims that, on the contrary, the sentence must constitute the minimal element of writing — what he calls the “unit of any literary product” such that “[a]ny further subdivision would leave one with an unusable [. . .] fragment.” ²⁸ Silliman argues that because infants, when learning language, can imitate the contours of a sentence long before they can parse it into subunits, “the sentence is in some sense a primary unit of language.” ²⁹ He suggests that “[t]he sentence is the horizon, the border between [...] two fundamentally distinct types of integration” :³⁰ one grammatical, one syllogistic — the sentence acting as a “hinge unit” between rules of syntax and rules of reason. The sentence thus provides the standard currency of exchange across orders of meaning, converting a fund of unusable fragments into the coin of tradable arguments.