1.
Adjunct (grammar)
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In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or structurally dispensable, part of a sentence, clause, or phrase that, if removed or discarded, will not otherwise affect the remainder of the sentence. Example, In the sentence John helped Bill in Central Park, an adjunct is not an argument, and an argument is not an adjunct. The argument–adjunct distinction is central in most theories of syntax and semantics, the terminology used to denote arguments and adjuncts can vary depending on the theory at hand. Some dependency grammars, for instance, employ the term circonstant, the area of grammar that explores the nature of predicates, their arguments, and adjuncts is called valency theory. Predicates have valency, they determine the number and type of arguments that can or must appear in their environment, the valency of predicates is also investigated in terms of subcategorization. Take the sentence John helped Bill in Central Park on Sunday as an example, in Central Park is the first adjunct. on Sunday is the second adjunct. An adverbial adjunct is an element that often establishes the circumstances in which the action or state expressed by the verb takes place. The following sentence uses adjuncts of time and place, Yesterday, notice that this example is ambiguous between whether the adjunct in the garden modifies the verb saw or the noun phrase the dog. The definition can be extended to include adjuncts that modify nouns or other parts of speech, an adjunct can be a single word, a phrase, or an entire clause. Single word She will leave tomorrow, phrase She will leave in the morning. Clause She will leave after she has had breakfast, most discussions of adjuncts focus on adverbial adjuncts, that is, on adjuncts that modify verbs, verb phrases, or entire clauses like the adjuncts in the three examples just given. Adjuncts can appear in other domains, however, that is, an adnominal adjunct is one that modifies a noun, for a list of possible types of these, see Components of noun phrases. Adjuncts that modify adjectives and adverbs are occasionally called adadjectival and adadverbial, the discussion before the game – before the game is an adnominal adjunct. Very happy – very is an adadjectival adjunct, too loudly – too is an adadverbial adjunct. Each of the adjuncts in the examples throughout this article is a constituent, adjuncts can be categorized in terms of the functional meaning that they contribute to the phrase, clause, or sentence in which they appear. The ladder collapsed because it was old, Concessive – Concessive adjuncts establish contrary circumstances. Lorna went out although it was raining, Conditional – Conditional adjuncts establish the condition in which an action occurs or state holds. I would go to Paris, if I had the money, Consecutive – Consecutive adjuncts establish an effect or result
2.
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
3.
Phrase
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In everyday speech, a phrase may be any group of words, often carrying a special idiomatic meaning, in this sense it is roughly synonymous with expression. In linguistic analysis, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a constituent in the syntax of a sentence, a phrase typically appears within a clause, but it is possible also for a phrase to be a clause or to contain a clause within it. There is a difference between the use of the term phrase and its technical use in linguistics. In common usage, a phrase is usually a group of words with some special meaning or other significance, such as all rights reserved, economical with the truth, kick the bucket. It may be a euphemism, a saying or proverb, a fixed expression, in grammatical analysis, particularly in theories of syntax, a phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single word, which plays a particular role within the grammatical structure of a sentence. It does not have to have any meaning or significance, or even exist anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed. This means that expressions that may be called phrases in everyday language are not phrases in the technical sense. In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a key word that identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase, this is known as the head-word, or the head. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase, for example, the remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head. Most theories of syntax view most phrases as having a head, a phrase lacking a head is known as exocentric, and phrases with heads are endocentric. When a noun is used in a sentence without an explicit determiner, for full discussion, see Determiner phrase. See the Generative approaches section of the article for details. Many theories of syntax and grammar illustrate sentence structure using phrase trees, trees show the words, phrases, and, at times, clauses that make up sentences. Any word combination that corresponds to a complete subtree can be seen as a phrase, there are two established and competing principles for constructing trees, they produce constituency and dependency trees and both are illustrated here using an example sentence. The node labels in the two trees mark the syntactic category of the different constituents, or word elements, of the sentence, in the constituency tree each phrase is marked by a phrasal node, and there are eight phrases identified by phrase structure analysis in the example sentence. On the other hand, the tree identifies a phrase by any node that exerts dependency upon, or dominates. And, using dependency analysis, there are six phrases in the sentence, the trees and phrase-counts demonstrate that different theories of syntax differ in the word combinations they qualify as a phrase. Here the constituency tree identifies three phrases that the tree does not, namely, house at the end of the street, end of the street
4.
Argument (linguistics)
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In linguistics, an argument is an expression that helps complete the meaning of a predicate, the latter referring in this context to a main verb and its auxiliaries. In this regard, the complement is a related concept. Most predicates take one, two, or three arguments, a predicate and its arguments form a predicate-argument structure. The discussion of predicates and arguments is associated most with verbs and noun phrases, although other syntactic categories can also be construed as predicates, arguments must be distinguished from adjuncts. While a predicate needs its arguments to complete its meaning, the adjuncts that appear with a predicate are optional, most theories of syntax and semantics acknowledge arguments and adjuncts, although the terminology varies, and the distinction is generally believed to exist in all languages. Dependency grammars sometimes call arguments actants, following Tesnière, the area of grammar that explores the nature of predicates, their arguments, and adjuncts is called valency theory. Predicates have a valence, they determine the number and type of arguments that can or must appear in their environment, the valence of predicates is also investigated in terms of subcategorization. The basic analysis of the syntax and semantics of clauses relies heavily on the distinction between arguments and adjuncts, the clause predicate, which is often a content verb, demands certain arguments. That is, the arguments are necessary in order to complete the meaning of the verb, the adjuncts that appear, in contrast, are not necessary in this sense. The subject phrase and object phrase are the two most frequently occurring arguments of verbal predicates, the old man helped the young man. Each of these sentences contains two arguments, the first noun being the argument, and the second the object argument. Jill, for example, is the argument of the predicate likes. When additional information is added to our three example sentences, one is dealing with adjuncts, e. g. Jill really likes Jack, Jill likes Jack most of the time. Jill likes Jack when the sun shines, Jill likes Jack because hes friendly. The added phrases are adjuncts, they provide information that is not necessary to complete the meaning of the predicate likes. One key difference between arguments and adjuncts is that the appearance of an argument is often obligatory, whereas adjuncts appear optionally. While typical verb arguments are subject or object nouns or noun phrases as in the examples above, the PPs in bold in the following sentences are arguments, Sam put the pen on the chair. Larry does not put up with that, Bill is getting on my case
5.
Ambiguity
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Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are plausible. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. The concept of ambiguity is contrasted with vagueness. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted, whereas with information that is vague, context may play a role in resolving ambiguity. For example, the piece of information may be ambiguous in one context. The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase pertains to its more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. Meaning here refers to whatever should be captured by a good dictionary, for instance, the word bank has several distinct lexical definitions, including financial institution and edge of a river. Another example is as in apothecary, one could say I bought herbs from the apothecary. This could mean one actually spoke to the apothecary or went to the apothecary, the context in which an ambiguous word is used often makes it evident which of the meanings is intended. If, for instance, someone says I buried $100 in the bank, however, some linguistic contexts do not provide sufficient information to disambiguate a used word. Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the meaning with a word in context. The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to clarify their context, the goal of clear concise communication is that the receiver have no misunderstanding about what was meant to be conveyed. Ambiguity is a tool of political science. More problematic are words whose senses express closely related concepts, good, for example, can mean useful or functional, exemplary, pleasing, moral, righteous, etc. I have a daughter is not clear about which sense is intended. The various ways to apply prefixes and suffixes can also create ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity arises when a sentence can have two different meanings because of the structure of the sentence—its syntax. This is often due to an expression, such as a prepositional phrase. He ate the cookies on the couch, for example, could mean that he ate those cookies that were on the couch, to get in, you will need an entrance fee of $10 or your voucher and your drivers license
6.
Adpositional phrase
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An adpositional phrase, in linguistics, is a syntactic category that includes prepositional phrases, postpositional phrases, and circumpositional phrases. Adpositional phrases contain an adposition as head and usually a complement such as a noun phrase, language syntax treats adpositional phrases as units that act as arguments or adjuncts. Prepositional and postpositional phrases differ by the order of the words used, languages that are primarily head-initial such as English predominantly use prepositional phrases whereas head-final languages predominantly employ postpositional phrases. Many languages have both types, as well as circumpositional phrases, there are three types of adpositional phrases, prepositional phrases, postpositional phrases, and circumpositional phrases. The underlined phrases in the sentences are examples of prepositional phrases in English. The prepositions are in bold, a, ryan could see her in the room. David walked on top of the building, as a black man, I find that offensive. Prepositional phrases have a preposition as the element of the phrase. The remaining part of the phrase is followed by modifiers such as a noun, pronoun, gerund. Its sometimes called the prepositional complement, the object of the preposition will often have more than one modifier. The object of a phrase is to function as an adjective or adverb. Postpositional elements are frequent in languages such as Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali. The word or other morpheme that corresponds to an English preposition occurs after its complement, since a phrase like two years ago distributes just like a prepositional phrase, one can argue that ago should be classified as a postposition, as opposed to as an adjective or adverb. Circumpositional phrases involve both a preposition and a postposition, whereby the complement appears between the two, circumpositions are common in Pashto and Kurdish. English has at least one circumpositional construction, e. g. a, from now on, he wont help. German has more of them, e. g. b, von mir aus kannst du das machen. From me out can you that do = As far as Im concerned, um der Freundschaft willen sollst du es machen. Around the friendship sake should you it do = For the sake of friendship, like with all other types of phrases, theories of syntax render the syntactic structure of adpositional phrases using trees
7.
Clause
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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
8.
Adjective phrase
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An adjective phrase is a phrase whose head word is an adjective, e. g. fond of steak, very happy, quite upset about it, etc. The adjective in a phrase can initiate the phrase, conclude the phrase. The dependents of the head adjective—i. e, the other words and phrases inside the adjective phrase—are typically adverbs or prepositional phrases, but they can also be clauses. Adjectives and adjective phrases function in two ways in clauses, either attributively or predicatively. Sentences can contain tremendously long phrases and this sentence is not tremendously long. A player faster than you was on their team, sam ordered a very spicy but quite small pizza. The pizza is very spicy but quite small, people angry with the high prices were protesting. The people are angry with the high prices, – Predicative adjective phrase The distinguishing characteristic of an attributive adjective phrase is that it appears inside the noun phrase that it modifies. A predicative adjective, in contrast, appears outside of the phrase that it modifies, usually after a linking verb. The term adjectival phrase is used instead of adjective phrase. However, there is tendency to call a phrase an adjectival phrase in such a case where that phrase is functioning like an adjective phrase would, similarly, that boy is friendless and That boy is without a friend. Similarly, the adjectival phrase is commonly used for any phrase in attributive position, whether it is technically an adjective phrase, noun phrase. These may be more distinguished as phrasal attributives or attributive phrases. The structure of phrases is often represented using tree structures. There are two conventions for doing this, constituency-based trees of phrase structure grammars and dependency-based trees of dependency grammars. Both types of trees are produced here, the following trees illustrate head-final adjective phrases, i. e
9.
Syntax
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In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order. The term syntax is used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages, in mathematics, syntax refers to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as formal languages used in logic. The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek, σύνταξις coordination, which consists of σύν syn, together, and τάξις táxis, a basic feature of a languages syntax is the sequence in which the subject, verb, and object usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV, the other possible sequences are VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV, the last three of which are rare. In the West, the school of thought came to be known as traditional grammar began with the work of Dionysius Thrax. For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a known as grammaire générale. This system took as its premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought, the Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of Subject – Copula – Predicate, initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp. The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, there are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works of Derek Bickerton, sees syntax as a branch of biology, other linguists take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system. Yet others consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages, the hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The goal of grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language. This model could be used to all human language and to predict the grammaticality of any given utterance. This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky, most generative theories assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence and this complex category is notated as instead of V. NP\S is read as a category that searches to the left for an NP and outputs a sentence. The category of verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs to form a sentence
10.
International Standard Book Number
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The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker