"Try watching or preferably listening to the BBC. They do it."

No they don't.

Or are you suggesting American, Canadian Australian and even Indian news readers don't use "Standard English"?

If not, it's hardly very "standard" then, is it?

If you ever find someone who speaks so-called "Standard English", do let us all know.

I've never met such a person.

"This does not tell me anything at all out of context..."

And just what does the following sentence tell you out of context?

"There will be another one along in a moment."

Another what?

Ah yes, dear old Noam Chomsky.

"There are three things in life you must never run after: a bus, a woman and a theory of transformational grammar. There will be another one along in a moment."

First, let me commend Eduardo for attempting to bring a bit of objectivity to the subject. For some reason, language seems to be the one area where it is still socially permissible to make prejudiced statements about others: using the term "lazy" about the way someone speaks is the language equivalent of calling a person a "nigger", in my view.

I've encountered "I says" in Both AE and BE. In my experience, it actually follows a pretty clear pattern of use as a sort of "narrative" verb ("So he says... then I says...").

"English does not have capital letters. The script it uses has. And the reason is tradition."

There you have it in a nutshell.

dougincanada:

Ah, I see that you're falling back on an ad hominem argument; a sign of desperation? Anyway, I rather suspect that my level of language is at the very least quite the equal of yours.

Dictionaries can do no more than offer informed opinions on grammar. Again, I consider my opinions on how grammar functions at least as valid as theirs.

Your context argument is a nonsense. A single-word sentence like "Shit!" can require little context to be understood wholly in itself. But one of your "proper" sentences like "It is not so." has little or no useful meaning without further context.

The dictionary definition of a sentence is useful for someone at the ab initio stage of language instruction. Beyond that, any writer with a modicum of flair and talent will ignore it whenever it conflicts with their writing style.

Language is too expressive to be contained by petty and contrived regulations.

Oops! Looks like I had more than a couple of typos up there. Mea culpa! It's Monday morning.

Let me try again.

---

"A sentence needs a subject and predicate."

Not so.

You have decided to fall back on that old crutch: the because-I-say-so school of grammar.

That approach is fine at the very basic level of language training but it's not much use as language proficiency improves. As that happens, it starts to become quite apparent that one-word sentences can and do exist.

There.

---

Done.

"A sentence needs a subject and predicate."

Not so.

You have decided to fall back on that old crutch: the because-I-say-so-school of grammar.

That approach is fine at the very basic level of language training but it's not much use as language proficiency improves. As that happens, it starts to becomes quite apparent that one-word sentences can and do exist.

There.

* Ha ha!

"As a follow-up, why don’t we conjugate 'work' or keep it in the infinitive?"

And as a postscript, "work" is just that - an infinitive verb - in this example.

What some would call the "bare infinitive" because it lacks "to".