1.
Verb
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A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. In the usual description of English, the form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected to encode tense, aspect, mood, a verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses, present, to indicate that an action is being carried out, past, to indicate that an action has been done, future, in languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument in person, number or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreements only in the person singular, present tense form of verbs. The rest of the persons are not distinguished in the verb, Latin and the Romance languages inflect verbs for tense–aspect–mood, and they agree in person and number with the subject. Verbs vary by type, and each type is determined by the kinds of words that accompany it, classified by the number of their valency arguments, usually three basic types are distinguished, intransitives, transitives, ditransitives and double transitive verbs. In addition, verbs can be nonfinite, namely, not inflected for tense, an intransitive verb is one that does not have a direct object. Intransitive verbs may be followed by an adverb or end a sentence, for example, The woman spoke softly. The athlete ran faster than the official, a transitive verb is followed by a noun or noun phrase. These noun phrases are not called predicate nouns, but are called direct objects because they refer to the object that is being acted upon. For example, My friend read the newspaper, the teenager earned a speeding ticket. A way to identify a verb is to invert the sentence. For example, The newspaper was read by my friend, a speeding ticket was earned by the teenager. Ditransitive verbs precede either two noun phrases or a phrase and then a prepositional phrase often led by to or for. For example, The players gave their teammates high fives, the players gave high fives to their teammates. When two noun phrases follow a transitive verb, the first is an object, that which is receiving something, and the second is a direct object. Indirect objects can be noun phrases or prepositional phrases, double transitive verbs are followed by a noun phrase that serves as a direct object and then a second noun phrase, adjective, or infinitive phrase
Verb
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A single-word verb in
Spanish contains information about time (past, present, future), person and number. The process of grammatically modifying a verb to express this information is called
conjugation.
2.
Clause (linguistics)
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In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. A typical clause consists of a subject and a predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase, a simple sentence usually consists of a single finite clause with a finite verb that is independent. More complex sentences may contain multiple clauses, main clauses are those that can stand alone as a sentence. Subordinate clauses are those that would be awkward or incomplete if they were alone, a primary division for the discussion of clauses is the distinction between main clauses and subordinate clauses. A main clause can stand alone, i. e. it can constitute a complete sentence by itself. A subordinate clause, in contrast, is reliant on the appearance of a clause, it depends on the main clause and is therefore a dependent clause. A second major distinction concerns the difference between finite and non-finite clauses, a finite clause contains a structurally central finite verb, whereas the structurally central word of a non-finite clause is often a non-finite verb. Traditional grammar focuses on finite clauses, the awareness of non-finite clauses having arisen much later in connection with the study of syntax. The discussion here focuses on finite clauses, although some aspects of non-finite clauses are considered further below. Clauses can be classified according to a trait that is a prominent characteristic of their syntactic form. The position of the verb is one major trait used for classification. These two criteria overlap to an extent, which means that no single aspect of syntactic form is always decisive in determining how the clause functions. Standard SV-clauses are the norm in English and they are usually declarative, they express information in a neutral manner, e. g. The pig has not yet been fed, - Declarative clause, standard SV order Ive been hungry for two hours. - Declarative clause, standard SV order. that Ive been hungry for two hours and they can be viewed as basic, other clause types being derived from them. Standard SV-clauses can also be interrogative or exclamative, however, given the appropriate intonation contour and/or the appearance of a question word, the pig has not yet been fed. - Rising intonation on fed makes the clause a yes/no-question, the pig has not yet been fed. - Spoken forcefully, this clause is exclamative, youve been hungry for how long
Clause (linguistics)
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Adjectives
3.
Do-support
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The verb do can be used as an auxiliary even in simple declarative sentences, and it usually serves to add emphasis, as in I did shut the fridge. However, in the negated and inverted clauses referred to above and it is not idiomatic in Modern English to add the negating word not to a lexical verb with finite form, not can be added only to an auxiliary or copular verb. For example, the sentence I am not with the copula be is fully idiomatic, hence if there is no other auxiliary present when negation is required, the auxiliary do is used, to produce a form like I do not know. The same applies in clauses requiring inversion, including most questions, inversion must involve the subject, todays English usually substitutes Do you know him. Do-support is not used there is already an auxiliary or copular verb present or with non-finite verb forms. It is sometimes used with subjunctive forms, furthermore, the use of do as an auxiliary should be distinguished from the use of do as a normal lexical verb, as in They do their homework. Do-support appears to accommodate a number of varying grammatical constructions, question formation, the appearance of the negation not and these constructions often cannot occur without do-support or the presence of some other auxiliary verb. The presence of an auxiliary verb allows subject–auxiliary inversion to take place, if there is already an auxiliary or copula present, do-support is not required when forming questions, He will laugh. This applies not only in yes–no questions but also in questions formed using interrogative words, however, if there is no auxiliary or copula present, inversion requires the introduction of an auxiliary in the form of do-support, I know. The finite verb is now the auxiliary do, the verb is a bare infinitive which does not inflect. In negated questions, the word not may appear either following the subject. That applies both to do-support and to other auxiliaries, Why are you not playing, the above principles do not apply to wh-questions if the interrogative word is the subject or part of the subject. Then, there is no inversion and so there is no need for do-support, Who lives here. The verb have, in the sense of possession, is used without do-support as if it were an auxiliary. Do you have any idea what is going on here, for elliptical questions and tag questions, see the elliptical sentences section below. In the same way that the presence of an auxiliary allows question formation, then too, if no other auxiliary or copular verb is present, do-support is required. In the second sentence, do-support is required because Modern English does not allow forms like *She laughs not, the verb have, in the sense of possession, is sometimes negated thus, I havent the foggiest idea. Most combinations of auxiliary/copula plus not have a form ending in -nt, such as isnt, wont
Do-support
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Adjectives
4.
Closed class
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A part of speech is a category of words which have similar grammatical properties. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, the term form class is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions. Word classes may be classified as open or closed, open classes acquire new members constantly, while closed classes acquire new members infrequently, almost all languages have the word classes noun and verb, but beyond these there are significant variations in different languages. This variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties means that needs to be done for each individual language. Nevertheless, the labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria, the classification of words into lexical categories is found from the earliest moments in the history of linguistics. The ancient work on the grammar of the Tamil language, Tolkāppiyam, dated variously between the 1st and 10th centuries AD, classifies Tamil words as peyar, vinai, idai, and uri. A century or two after the work of Nirukta, the Greek scholar Plato wrote in his Cratylus dialog that, sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs and nouns. Aristotle added another class, conjunctions, which included not only the words known today as conjunctions, the Latin grammarian Priscian modified the above eightfold system, excluding article, but adding interjection. The Latin names for the parts of speech, from which the corresponding modern English terms derive, were nomen, verbum, participium, pronomen, praepositio, adverbium, the category nomen included substantives as well as adjectives. This is reflected in the older English terminology noun substantive and noun adjective, later the adjective became a separate class, and the English word noun came to be applied to substantives only. For discussion see the sections below, English words have been classified into eight or nine parts of speech, Noun a word or lexical item denoting any abstract or concrete entity, a person, place, thing, idea, or quality. Nouns can also be classified as count nouns or non-count nouns, the most common part of the speech, they are called naming words. Pronoun a substitute for a noun or noun phrase, pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns. Adjective a modifier of a noun or pronoun, adjectives make the meaning of another word more precise. Verb a word denoting an action, occurrence, or state of being, without a verb a group of words cannot be a clause or sentence. Adverb a modifier of an adjective, verb, or other adverb, preposition a word that relates words to each other in a phrase or sentence and aids in syntactic context. Prepositions show the relationship between a noun or a pronoun with another word in the sentence, conjunction a syntactic connector, links words, phrases, or clauses. Conjunctions connect words or group of words Interjection an emotional greeting or exclamation, interjections express strong feelings and emotions
Closed class
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A diagram showing some of the posited English
syntactic categories
5.
Modal verb
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A modal verb is a type of verb that is used to indicate modality – that is, likelihood, ability, permission, and obligation. Examples include the English verbs can/could, may/might, must, will/would, in English and other Germanic languages, modal verbs are often distinguished as a class based on certain grammatical properties. A modal auxiliary verb gives information about the function of the verb that it governs. An ambiguous case is You must speak Spanish, the primary meaning would be the deontic meaning but this may be intended epistemically Epistemic modals can be analyzed as raising verbs, while deontic modals can be analyzed as control verbs. Epistemic usages of modals tend to develop from deontic usages. e. Furthermore, there are numerous other verbs that can be viewed as modal verbs insofar as they clearly express modality in the way that the verbs in this list do, e. g. appear, have to, seem. In the strict sense, though, these verbs do not qualify as modal verbs in English because they do not allow subject-auxiliary inversion. If, however, one defines modal verb entirely in terms of meaning contribution, then these other verbs would also be modals, modals in English form a very distinctive class of verbs. In clauses that contain two or more verbs, any modal that is present appears as the left-most verb in the verb catena, what this means is that the modal verb is always finite. In the syntactic structure of the clause, the verb is the clause root. The following dependency trees illustrate the point, The verb catenae are in blue. The modal auxiliary in both trees is the root of the entire sentence, the verb that is immediately subordinate to the modal is always an infinitive. The fact that modal auxiliaries in English are necessarily finite means that within the finite clause that contains them, they can never be subordinate to another verb. Sam may have done his homework, - The modal auxiliary may is the root of the clause. *Sam has may done his homework, - The sentence fails because the modal auxiliary may is not the root of the clause. - The modal auxiliary will is the root of the clause, - The sentence fails because the modal auxiliary will is not the root of the clause. This trait of modal auxiliaries has motivated the designation defective, that is, modal auxiliaries are defective in English because they are so limited in their form, one can note further in this area that English modal auxiliaries are quite unlike modal verbs in closely related languages. In German, for instance, modals can occur as non-finite verbs, the table below lists some modal verbs with common roots in English, German, Dutch, Low Saxon, West Frisian and Afrikaans
Modal verb
6.
Going to
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The going-to future is a grammatical construction used in English to refer to various types of future occurrences. It is made using forms of the expression to be going to. Constructions analogous to the English going-to future are found in other languages, including French. The going-to future originated by the extension of the sense of the verb go to a temporal sense. The original construction involved physical movement with an intention, such as I am going to harvest the crop, the location later became unnecessary, and the expression was reinterpreted to represent a near future. The colloquial form gonna and the variations of it as mentioned in the following section result from a relaxed pronunciation of going to. The going-to idiom, used to express futurity is a verb that consists of a form of the copula verb be. Like other modals, it is followed by the infinitive of the main verb It can be put into question. Some examples, The boys are going to fight, Im going to try the wine. Hes not going to make it, are you going to bring Sue. Arent they going to wear coats and we were going to tell you earlier. The going to of this construction is frequently contracted in colloquial English to gonna. Hence Youre going to like it could be said as Youre gonna like it or just You gonna like it, in the first person, Im gonna may further contract to Imna /ˈaɪmənə/ or Imma /ˈaɪmə/, or frequently /ˈəmə/. This is true even when the verb is elided, as in Yes. That the verb go as used in construction is distinct from the ordinary lexical verb go can be seen in the fact that the two can be used together, Im going to go to the store now. The going-to future is one of several used in English to refer to future events. e. to express the present relevance of the future occurrence. It may therefore be described as expressing prospective aspect, in the way that the present perfect is said to express retrospective aspect. There is no clear delineation between contexts where going to is used and those where other forms of expression are used
Going to
–
Adjectives
7.
English auxiliaries and contractions
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In English grammar, certain verb forms are classified as auxiliary verbs. Exact definitions of this vary, an auxiliary verb is generally conceived as one with little semantic meaning of its own. Certain auxiliaries have contracted forms, such as d and ll for had/would, there are also many contractions formed from the negations of auxiliary verbs, ending innt. These latter contractions can participate in inversion as a unit, for details about the verbs classed as modal auxiliaries, see English modal verbs. An auxiliary verb is most generally understood as a verb that helps another verb by adding information to it. On this basis, the verbs of English may be taken to include, forms of the verb do. The following are examples of sentences containing the above types of auxiliary verbs, – do is an auxiliary accompanying the verb want, used here to form a question. – had is an auxiliary accompanying the past participle given, expressing perfect aspect, – are is an auxiliary accompanying the present participle singing, expressing progressive aspect. – was is an auxiliary accompanying the past participle destroyed, expressive passive voice, – can is a modal auxiliary accompanying the verb do. Other approaches to defining auxiliary verbs are described in the following sections, there is a group of English verbs which have certain special grammatical properties that distinguish them from other verbs. However, not all enumerations of English auxiliary verbs correspond exactly to the group of verbs having these grammatical properties and this group of verbs may also be referred to by other names, such as special verbs. For example, inversion of subject and verb is possible in the sentence They can sing and they undergo negation by the addition of not after them. For example, one can say They cannot sing, but not *They like not to sing, other distinct features of verbs in this group include their ability to introduce verb phrase ellipsis, and the positioning of certain adverbs directly after them. If membership of this class is considered to be the defining property for auxiliary verbs. This concerns be, being and been, and when used in the expression of aspect, have. For this and other differences in the sets of words identified as auxiliaries by various authors, sometimes, non-auxiliary uses of have follow auxiliary syntax, as in Have you any ideas. Other lexical verbs do not do this in modern English, although they did so formerly, can be found in archaic English. Lists or sets of verbs in English, as given by various authors, generally consist of most or all of the verbs mentioned in the above sections
English auxiliaries and contractions
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Adjectives
8.
Light verb
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In linguistics, a light verb is a verb that has little semantic content of its own and forms a predicate with some additional expression, which is usually a noun. Common verbs in English that can function as light verbs are do, give, have, make, take, other names for light verb include delexical verb, vector verb, explicator verb, thin verb, empty verb or semantically weak verb. Most light verb constructions in English include a noun and are sometimes called stretched verbs, some light verb constructions also include a preposition, e. g. They did the review of my paper first, Susan is getting much support from her family. I am going to have a nice nap and we had a slow, boring conversation. Are you giving a presentation at the conference and they gave the kids a hard time. Who made such a severe mistake, why is Larry taking a nap. We should take a break soon, have you taken advantage of that opportunity. I havent taken that into consideration, the light verbs are underlined, and the words in bold together constitute the light verb constructions. Each of these constructions is the predicate of the sentence. Note that the determiner a is usually NOT part of the light verb construction and we know that it is not part of the light verb construction because it is variable, e. g. I took a long/the first/two/the best nap, the light verb contributes little content to its sentence, the main meaning resides with the noun in bold. Many light verb constructions are closely similar in meaning to a full verb. Sam did a revision of his paper, Larry wants to have a smoke. Jim made an important claim that, - Full verb Alternative formulations such as these lead to the insight that light verb constructions are predicates just like the corresponding full verb alternatives. There can be, however, nuanced differences in meaning across these alternative formulations, the light verb constructions produce possibilities for modification that are less available with the corresponding full verb alternatives. Many verbs that serve as light verbs can also serve as auxiliary verbs and/or full verbs depending on the context in which they appear, light verbs are similar to auxiliary verbs insofar as they contribute mainly functional content to the clauses in which they appear. Light verbs, however, are not auxiliary verbs, nor are they full verbs, light verbs differ from auxiliary verbs in English insofar as they do not pass the syntactic tests that identify auxiliary verbs
Light verb
9.
English modal verb
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The modal verbs of English are a small class of auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality. They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness and by the fact that they do not take the ending -s in the third-person singular, the principal English modal verbs are can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will and would. Certain other verbs are sometimes, but not always, classed as modals, these include ought, had better, verbs which share some but not all of the characteristics of the principal modals are sometimes called semimodals. The verbs customarily classed as modals in English have the properties, They do not inflect. They do not add the ending -s in the third-person singular and they are defective, they are not used as infinitives or participles, nor as imperatives, nor as subjunctives. They function as verbs, they modify the meaning of another verb. This verb generally appears as an infinitive, although in some definitions a modal verb can also govern the to-infinitive. They have the properties associated with auxiliary verbs in English, principally that they can undergo subject–auxiliary inversion. The following verbs have all of the properties, and can be classed as the principal modal verbs of English. Note that most of these so-called preterite forms are most often used in the mood in the present tense. The auxiliary verbs may and let are also used often in the subjunctive mood, famous examples of these are May The Force be with you, and Let God bless you with good. These are both sentences that express some uncertainty, hence they are subjunctive sentences, the verbs listed below mostly share the above features, but with certain differences. They are sometimes, but not always, categorized as modal verbs and they may also be called semimodals. The verb ought differs from the principal modals only in that it governs a to-infinitive rather than a bare infinitive. The verbs dare and need can be used as modals, often in the negative, although they are more commonly found in constructions where they appear as ordinary inflected verbs. There is also a verb, nearly obsolete but sometimes heard in Appalachia and the Deep South of the United States, darest. The verb had in the expression had better behaves like a modal verb, the verb used in the expression used to can behave as a modal, but is more often used with do-support than with auxiliary-verb syntax, Did she used to do it. And She didnt used to do it are more common than Used she to do it, and She used not to do it
English modal verb
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Adjectives
10.
Future-in-the-past
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This article describes the uses of various verb forms in the English language. For details of how inflected forms of verbs are produced in English, for the grammatical structure of clauses, including word order, see English clause syntax. For certain other topics, see the articles listed in the adjacent box. Some forms of be and of other auxiliary verbs also have contracted forms. For full details of how inflected forms of verbs are produced. In English, verbs frequently appear in combinations containing one or more auxiliary verbs, for example, The dog was barking very loudly. Jane does not really like us, the first verb in such a combination is the finite verb, the remainder are nonfinite. Such combinations are called compound verbs, more technically they may be called verb catenae. As the last example shows, the making up these combinations do not always remain consecutive. For details of the formation of such constructions, see English clause syntax, the uses of the various types of combination are described in the detailed sections of the present article. As in many languages, the means English uses for expressing the three categories of tense, aspect and mood are somewhat conflated. The tenses, aspects and moods that may be identified in English are described below, Present tense is used, in principle, to refer to circumstances that exist at the present time. However the same forms are often also used to refer to future circumstances. For certain grammatical contexts where the present tense is the way to refer to the future, see conditional sentences. It is also possible for the present tense to be used referring to no particular real time. The present perfect intrinsically refers to past events, although it can be considered to primarily the resulting present situation rather than the events themselves. The present tense has two moods, indicative and subjunctive, when no mood is specified, it is often the indicative that is meant. In a present indicative construction, the verb appears in its base form
Future-in-the-past
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Adjectives
11.
Head (linguistics)
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In linguistics, the head of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic type of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun water, analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound. For example, the head of the compound noun handbag is bag, since a handbag is a bag, the other elements of the phrase or compound modify the head, and are therefore the heads dependents. Headed phrases and compounds are called endocentric, whereas exocentric phrases, heads are crucial to establishing the direction of branching. Head-initial phrases are right-branching, head-final phrases are left-branching, and head-medial phrases combine left-, examine the following expressions, big red dog birdsong The word dog is the head of big red dog, since it determines that the phrase is a noun phrase, not an adjective phrase. Because the adjectives big and red modify this head noun, they are its dependents, similarly, in the compound noun birdsong, the stem song is the head, since it determines the basic meaning of the compound. The stem bird modifies this meaning and is dependent on song. The birdsong is a kind of song, not a kind of bird, conversely, a songbird is a type of bird, since the stem bird is the head in this compound. The heads of phrases like the ones here can often be identified by way of constituency tests, for instance, substituting a single word in place of the phrase big red dog requires the substitute to be a noun, not an adjective. Many theories of syntax represent heads by means of tree structures and these trees tend to be organized in terms of one of two relations, either in terms of the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars or the dependency relation of dependency grammars. Both relations are illustrated with the trees, The constituency relation is shown on the left. The a-trees identify heads by way of category labels, whereas the use the words themselves as the labels. The noun stories is the head over the adjective funny, in the constituency trees on the left, the noun projects its category status up to the mother node, so that the entire phrase is identified as a noun phrase. The constituency trees are structurally the same as their dependency counterparts, the conventions illustrated with these trees are just a couple of the various tools that grammarians employ to identify heads and dependents. While other conventions abound, they are similar to the ones illustrated here. The four trees above show a head-final structure, the following trees illustrate head-final structures further as well as head-initial and head-medial structures. The constituency trees appear on the left, and dependency trees on the right, henceforth the convention is employed where the words appear as the labels on the nodes. Since some prominent phrase structure grammars take all branching to be binary, trees that are based on the X-bar schema also acknowledge head-initial, head-final, and head-medial phrases, although the depiction of heads is less direct
Head (linguistics)
Head (linguistics)
Head (linguistics)
Head (linguistics)
12.
Predicate (grammar)
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There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. The competition between two concepts has generated confusion concerning the use of the term predicate in theories of grammar. This article considers both of these notions, the second notion was derived from work in predicate calculus and is prominent in modern theories of syntax and grammar. In this approach, the predicate of a sentence mostly corresponds to the verb and any auxiliaries that accompany the main verb. The predicate in traditional grammar is inspired by propositional logic of antiquity, a predicate is seen as a property that a subject has or is characterized by. A predicate is therefore an expression that can be true of something, thus, the expression is moving is true of anything that is moving. It is also the understanding of predicates in English-language dictionaries, the predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence. The predicate must contain a verb, and the verb requires or permits other elements to complete the predicate and these elements are objects, predicatives, and adjuncts, She dances. – verb-only predicate Ben reads the book, – verb-plus-direct-object predicate Bens mother, Felicity, gave me a present. – verb-plus-indirect-object-plus-direct-object predicate She listened to the radio, – verb-plus-prepositional-object predicate They elected him president. – verb-plus-object-plus-predicative-noun predicate She met him in the park, – verb-plus-object-plus-adjunct predicate She is in the park. – verb-plus-predicative-prepositional-phrase predicate The predicate provides information about the subject, such as what the subject is, what the subject is doing, the relation between a subject and its predicate is sometimes called a nexus. A predicative nominal is a phrase, such as in George III is the king of England. The subject and predicative nominal must be connected by a linking verb, a predicative adjective is an adjective, such as in Ivano is attractive, attractive being the predicative adjective. The subject and predicative adjective must also be connected by a copula and this traditional understanding of predicates has a concrete reflex in all phrase structure theories of syntax. These theories divide the generic declarative sentence into a phrase and verb phrase. The subject NP is shown in green, and the predicate VP in blue, most modern theories of syntax and grammar take their inspiration for the theory of predicates from predicate calculus as associated with Gottlob Frege. This understanding sees predicates as relations or functions over arguments, the predicate serves either to assign a property to a single argument or to relate two or more arguments to each other
Predicate (grammar)
13.
Catena (linguistics)
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In linguistics, the catena is a unit of syntax and morphology, closely associated with dependency grammars. It is a flexible and inclusive unit than the constituent. While the catena concept has been applied mainly to the syntax of English, other works are also demonstrating its applicability to the syntax and morphology of other languages. Catena Any element or any combination of elements that are continuous in the vertical dimension In terms of graph theory, in this regard, every constituent is a catena, but there are many catenae that are not constituents. The constituent is therefore a subtype of catena, Any individual element or combination of elements linked together in the vertical dimension is a catena. Sentence structure is conceived of as existing in two dimensions, combinations organized along the horizontal dimension are called strings, whereas combinations organized along the vertical dimension are catenae. In terms of a coordinate system, strings exist along the x-axis. An understanding of the catena is established by distinguishing between the catena and other, similarly defined units, there are four units that are pertinent in this regard, string, catena, component, and constituent. These definitions will now be illustrated with the help of the dependency tree. g. AC, BD, CE, BCE, ADF, ABEF, ABDEF, observe as well that there are a mere six constituents, but 24 catenae. There are therefore four times more catenae in the tree there are constituents. The inclusivity and flexibility of the unit becomes apparent. The following Venn diagram provides an overview of how the four units relate to other, While all four units are important. Idiosyncratic language of all sorts can be captured in terms of catenae, when meaning is constructed in such a manner that does not allow one to acknowledge meaning chunks as constituents, the catena is involved. The meaning bearing units are catenae, not constituents and this situation is illustrated here in terms of various collocations and proper idioms. Simple collocations demonstrate well the catena concept, the idiosyncratic nature of particle verb collocations provide the first group of examples, take after, take in, take on, take over, take up, etc. In its purest form, the verb take means seize, grab, in these collocations with the various particles, however, the meaning of take shifts significantly each time depending on the particle. In such cases, one says that the meaning is non-compositional, non-compositional meaning can be captured in terms of catenae
Catena (linguistics)
Catena (linguistics)
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Illustration of morph catenae
Catena (linguistics)
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Catena (linguistics)
14.
Periphrasis
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In linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which grammatical meaning is expressed by one or more free morphemes, instead of by inflectional affixes or derivation. Periphrastic forms are analytic, whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthesis, while periphrasis concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catenae. The verb catenae of English are highly periphrastic, the distinction between inflected and periphrastic forms is usually illustrated across distinct languages. However, comparative and superlative forms of adjectives in English provide an illustration of the phenomenon. The words more and most contribute functional meaning only, just like the inflectional affixes -er, the distinction is also evident across full verbs and the corresponding light verb constructions, The light verb constructions are periphrastic because the light verbs have little semantic content. The main semantic content of light verb constructions lies with the noun phrase. Distinctions of this sort abound across languages, the following table provides some examples across Latin and English, Periphrasis is a characteristic of analytic languages, which tend to avoid inflection. Even strongly inflected synthetic languages sometimes make use of periphrasis to fill out a paradigm that is missing certain forms. A comparison of some Latin forms of the verb dūcere lead with their English translations illustrates further that English uses periphrasis in many instances where Latin uses inflection, English often needs two or three verbs to express the same meaning that Latin expresses with a single verb. The correspondence in meaning across inflected forms and their periphrastic equivalents within the language or across different languages leads to a basic question. Individual words are always constituents, but their periphrastic equivalents are often NOT constituents, given this mismatch in syntactic form, one can pose the following questions, how should the form-meaning correspondence across periphrastic and non-periphrastic forms be understood. How does it come to pass that a specific meaning bearing unit can be a constituent in one case but in another case, an answer to this question that has recently come to light is expressed in terms of the catena unit, as implied above. The periphrastic word combinations are catenae even when they are not constituents, the form-meaning correspondence is therefore consistent. A given inflected one-word catena corresponds to a periphrastic multiple-word catena, the role of catenae for the theory of periphrasis is illustrated with the trees that follow. The first example is across French and English, future tense/time in French is often constructed with an inflected form, whereas English typically employs a periphrastic form, e. g. The next example is across German and English, German often expresses a benefitor with a dative case pronoun. For English to express the meaning, it usually employs the periphrastic two-word prepositional phrase with for. The following trees illustrate the periphrasis of light verb constructions, Each time, Each of these predicates is a periphrastic form insofar at least one function word is present
Periphrasis
15.
Dependency grammar
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Dependency grammar is a class of modern syntactic theories that are all based on the dependency relation and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesnière. Dependency is the notion that linguistic units, e. g. words, are connected to other by directed links. The verb is taken to be the center of clause structure. All other syntactic units are directly or indirectly connected to the verb in terms of the directed links. DGs are distinct from phrase structure grammars since DGs lack phrasal nodes although they acknowledge phrases, structure is determined by the relation between a word and its dependents. Ibn Maḍāʾ, a 12th-century linguist from Córdoba, Andalusia, may have been the first grammarian to use the term dependency in the sense that we use it today. Dependency is also present in the works of Sámuel Brassai, a Hungarian linguist, and of Heimann Hariton Tiktin. Modern dependency grammars, however, begin primarily with the work of Lucien Tesnière, Tesnière was a Frenchman, a polyglot, and a professor of linguistics at the universities in Strasbourg and Montpellier. His major work Éléments de syntaxe structurale was published posthumously in 1959 – he died in 1954, DG has generated a lot of interest in Germany in both theoretical syntax and language pedagogy. Dependency-based systems are increasingly being used to parse natural language and generate tree banks, interest in dependency grammar is growing at present, international conferences on dependency linguistics being a relatively recent development. Dependency is a correspondence, for every element in the sentence. The result of this correspondence is that dependency grammars are word grammars. All that exist are the elements and the dependencies that connect the elements into a structure and this situation should be compared with the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars. Constituency is a correspondence, which means that, for every element in a sentence. The result of difference is that dependency structures are minimal compared to their constituency structure counterparts. These two trees illustrate just two ways to render the dependency and constituency relations. This dependency tree is a tree, i. e. it reflects actual word order. Many dependency trees abstract away from linear order and focus just on hierarchical order and this constituency tree follows the conventions of bare phrase structure, whereby the words themselves are employed as the node labels
Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar
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Hybrid constituency/dependency tree from the
Quranic Arabic Corpus
Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar
