1.
Article (grammar)
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An article is a word that is used alongside a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, an and a are modern forms of the Old English an, which in Anglian dialects was the number one and survived into Modern Scots as the number owan. Both on and an survived into Modern English, with one used as the number, in many languages, articles are a special part of speech, which cannot easily be combined with other parts of speech. In English, articles are considered a part of a broader speech category called determiners. In languages that employ articles, every common noun, with exceptions, is expressed with a certain definiteness. Every noun must be accompanied by the article, if any, corresponding to its definiteness, and this is in contrast to other adjectives and determiners, which are typically optional. This obligatory nature of articles makes them among the most common words in many languages—in English, for example, articles are usually characterized as either definite or indefinite. A few languages with well-developed systems of articles may distinguish additional subtypes, within each type, languages may have various forms of each article, according to grammatical attributes such as gender, number, or case, or according to adjacent sounds. The definite article is used to refer to a member of a group or class. It may be something that the speaker has already mentioned or it may be something uniquely specified, the definite article in English for both singular and plural nouns, is the. The children know the fastest way home, the sentence above refers to specific children and a specific way home, it contrasts with the much more general observation that, Children know the fastest ways home. The latter sentence refers to children in general and their specific ways home, refers to a specific book whose identity is known or obvious to the listener, as such it has a markedly different meaning from Give me a book. Which uses an indefinite article, which does not specify what book is to be given, the definite article can also be used in English to indicate a specific class among other classes, The cabbage white butterfly lays its eggs on members of the Brassica genus. However, recent developments show that definite articles are morphological elements linked to certain noun types due to lexicalization, under this point of view, definiteness does not play a role in the selection of a definite article more than the lexical entry attached to the article. The definite article is also used with proper names, which are already specified by definition. For example, the Amazon, the Hebrides, in these cases, the definite article may be considered superfluous. Its presence can be accounted for by the assumption that they are shorthand for a phrase in which the name is a specifier, i. e. the Amazon River
Article (grammar)
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indefinite and definite articles
2.
Adjective
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In linguistics, an adjective is a describing word, the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified. Adjectives are one of the English parts of speech, although historically they were classed together with the nouns, certain words that were traditionally considered to be adjectives, including the, this, my, etc. are today usually classed separately, as determiners. Adjective comes from Latin adjectīvum additional, a calque of Ancient Greek, in the grammatical tradition of Latin and Greek, because adjectives were inflected for gender, number, and case like nouns, they were considered a subtype of noun. The words that are typically called nouns were then called substantive nouns. The terms noun substantive and noun adjective were formerly used in English, in English, attributive adjectives usually precede their nouns in simple phrases, but often follow their nouns when the adjective is modified or qualified by a phrase acting as an adverb. For example, I saw three kids, and I saw three kids happy enough to jump up and down with glee. Predicative adjectives are linked via a copula or other linking mechanism to the noun or pronoun they modify, for example, happy is an adjective in they are happy. Nominal adjectives act almost as nouns, One way this can happen is if a noun is elided and an attributive adjective is left behind. In the sentence, I read two books to them, he preferred the sad book, but she preferred the happy, happy is a nominal adjective, short for happy one or happy book. Another way this can happen is in phrases like out with the old, in with the new, where the old means, that which is old or all that is old, and similarly with the new. In such cases, the adjective functions either as a noun or as a plural count noun, as in The meek shall inherit the Earth. Adjectives feature as a part of speech in most languages, in some languages, the words that serve the semantic function of adjectives may be categorized together with some other class, such as nouns or verbs. Such an analysis is possible for the grammar of Standard Chinese, different languages do not always use adjectives in exactly the same situations. For example, where English uses to be hungry, Dutch and French use honger hebben, similarly, where Hebrew uses the adjective זקוק zaqūq, English uses the verb to need. In languages which have adjectives as a class, they are usually an open class. However, Bantu languages are known for having only a small closed class of adjectives. Many languages, including English, distinguish between adjectives, which qualify nouns and pronouns, and adverbs, which mainly modify verbs, adjectives, not all languages have exactly this distinction and many languages, including English, have words that can function as both. For example, in English fast is an adjective in a fast car, in Dutch and German, adjectives and adverbs are usually identical in form and many grammarians do not make the distinction, but patterns of inflection can suggest a difference, Eine kluge neue Idee
Adjective
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Adjectives
3.
English grammar
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English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, There are historical, social, cultural and regional variations of English. Divergences from the described here occur in some dialects of English. There are differences in grammar between the forms of British, American, and Australian English, although these are minor compared with the differences in vocabulary. Eight word classes or parts of speech are commonly distinguished in English, nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Interjections are another class, but these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form open classes – word classes that readily accept new members, such as the noun celebutante, the others are considered to be closed classes. For example, it is rare for a new pronoun to enter the language, English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to except, to some extent, on the other hand, some words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun, lexemes may be inflected to express different grammatical categories. The lexeme run has the forms runs, ran, runny, runner, words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to rise to new words. The noun aerobics has recently given rise to the adjective aerobicized, a phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. For example, my good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun. Similarly, adjective phrases and adverb phrases function as if they were adjectives or adverbs, Nouns form the largest English word class. There are many common suffixes used to form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age, -hood, Nouns are also often created by conversion of verbs or adjectives, as with the words talk and reading. Unlike in many related languages, English nouns do not have grammatical gender, Nouns are sometimes classified semantically as proper nouns and common nouns or as concrete nouns and abstract nouns. A grammatical distinction is made between count nouns such as clock and city, and non-count nouns such as milk and decor
English grammar
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Adjectives
4.
Grammatical case
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Case is a special grammatical category whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle or numeral in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners, participles, prepositions, numerals, articles and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in. Distinctions can be seen with the pronouns, forms such as I, he and we are used in the role of subject, whereas forms such as me, him. A language may have a number of different cases, commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition, as a language evolves, cases can merge, a phenomenon formally called syncretism. More formally, case has been defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads, cases should be distinguished from thematic roles such as agent and patient. They are often related, and in languages such as Latin several thematic roles have an associated case. Languages having cases often exhibit free word order, because thematic roles are not required to be marked by position in the sentence. The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, the Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. falling, fall. The sense is that all cases are considered to have fallen away from the nominative. This picture is reflected in the word declension, from Latin declinere, to lean. The equivalent to case in several other European languages also derives from casus, including cas in French, caso in Spanish, the Finnish equivalent is sija, which can also mean position or support. Although not very prominent in modern English, cases featured much more saliently in Old English and other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. Among modern languages, cases still feature prominently in most of the Balto-Slavic languages, with most having six to eight cases, as well as Icelandic, German and Modern Greek, in German, cases are mostly marked on articles and adjectives, and less so on nouns. Case is based fundamentally on changes to the noun to indicate the role in the sentence. This is not how English works, where word order and prepositions are used to achieve this, Modern English has largely abandoned the inflectional case system of Indo-European in favor of analytic constructions. The personal pronouns of Modern English retain morphological case more strongly than any other word class, for other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, grammatical function is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the genitive clitic -s. The oblique case, used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, the genitive case, used for a grammatical possessor
Grammatical case
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On this sign in Russian memorializing an anniversary of the city of
Balakhna, the word Balakhna on the right is in the nominative case, while the word Balakhne is in the dative case in Balakhne 500 Let ('Balakhna is 500 years old') on the front of the sign. Meanwhile let is in the genitive (plural) case.
5.
Grammatical conjugation
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In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations albeit some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation, typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it. All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme, the term conjugation is applied only to the inflection of verbs, and not of other parts of speech. Conjugation is also the name for a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language. For example, Latin is said to have four conjugations of verbs and this means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts. A verb that does not follow all of the conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm. Indo-European languages usually inflect verbs for several categories in complex paradigms, although some. This is usually the most irregular verb, the similarities in corresponding verb forms may be noticed. Some of the conjugations may be disused, like the English thou-form, or have meanings, like the English you-form. 1 Archaic, poetical, used only with the pronoun thou,3 In the bokmål written standard. 4 In the nynorsk written standard, vera and vere are both alternate forms. 6 eínai is only used as a noun,8 In the Tosk and Geg dialects, respectively. 9 Existential, هست has another meaning, usage of is considered to be rural, now. See, Indo-European copula Verbal agreement or concord is a construct in which properties of the subject and/or objects of a verb are indicated by the verb form. Verbs are then said to agree with their subjects, many English verbs exhibit subject agreement of the following sort, whereas I go, you go, we go, they go are all grammatical in standard English, she go is not. Instead, a form of the verb to go has to be used to produce she goes. On the other hand I goes, you goes etc. are not grammatical in standard English
Grammatical conjugation
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Part of the conjugation of the
Spanish verb correr, "to run", the lexeme is "corr-". Red represents the speaker, purple the
addressee and teal a third person. One person represents the singular number and two, the plural number. Dawn represents the past, noon the present and night the future.
6.
Grammatical person
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Grammatical person, in linguistics, is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant in an event, typically the distinction is between the speaker, the addressee, and others. Put in simple colloquial English, first person is literally I, Second person is literally you, third person is everything else, grammatical person typically defines a languages set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs, sometimes nouns, and possessive relationships, in Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically also marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual form as well. Some languages, especially European ones, distinguish degrees of formality and informality, some other languages use different classifying systems, especially in the plural pronouns. Many Malayo-Polynesian languages, such as Javanese and Balinese, are known for their complex systems of honorifics, Japanese. In many languages, the verb takes a form dependent on the person of the subject, in many languages, such as French, the verb in any given tense takes a different suffix for any of the various combinations of person and number of the subject. The grammars of some languages divide the space into more than three persons. The extra categories may be termed fourth person, fifth person, such terms are not absolute but can refer depending on context to any of several phenomena. Some Algonquian languages and Salishan languages divide the category of third person into two parts, proximate for a more topical third person, and obviative for a less topical third person, the obviative is sometimes called the fourth person. The term fourth person is sometimes used for the category of indefinite or generic referents. When the grammar treats them differently from ordinary third-person forms, the so-called zero person in Finnish and related languages, in addition to passive voice may serve to leave the subject-referent open. Zero person subjects are sometimes translated as one, but the problem with that is that English language constructions involving one, e. g. I, The Meaning of the First Person Term
Grammatical person
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In
Romance languages such as
Spanish, the grammatical person affects the verb conjugation. In this image, each row represents person and number: 1st person, 2nd person informal and 2nd person formal and 3rd person. Columns represent
tense (image: morning - past, noon - present, night - future).
7.
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
8.
Adverb
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An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, noun phrase, clause, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty and this function is called the adverbial function, and may be realised by single words or by multi-word expressions. Adverbs are traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech, the term implies that the principal function of adverbs is to act as modifiers of verbs or verb phrases. An adverb used in this way may provide information about the manner, place, time, frequency, certainty, the major exception is the function of modifier of nouns, which is performed instead by adjectives. When the function of an adverb is performed by an expression consisting of more than one word, it is called a phrase or adverbial clause. In English, adverbs of manner are formed by adding -ly to adjectives. Other languages often have similar methods for deriving adverbs from adjectives, many other adverbs, however, are not related to adjectives in this way, they may be derived from other words or phrases, or may be single morphemes. Examples of such adverbs in English include here, there, together, yesterday, aboard, very, almost, where the meaning permits, adverbs may undergo comparison, taking comparative and superlative forms. In English this is usually done by adding more and most before the adverb, although there are a few adverbs that take inflected forms, such as well, for which better and best are used. For more information about the formation and use of adverbs in English, for other languages, see § In specific languages below, and the articles on individual languages and their grammars. Adverbs are considered a part of speech in traditional English grammar, however, modern grammarians recognize that words traditionally grouped together as adverbs serve a number of different functions. Some describe adverbs a catch-all category that includes all words that do not belong to one of the parts of speech. A logical approach to dividing words into classes relies on recognizing which words can be used in a certain context, for example, the only type of word that can be inserted in the following template to form a grammatical sentence is a noun, The _____ is red. When this approach is taken, it is seen that adverbs fall into a number of different categories, for example, some adverbs can be used to modify an entire sentence, whereas others cannot. Even when a sentential adverb has other functions, the meaning is not the same. Words like very afford another example and we can say Perry is very fast, but not Perry very won the race. These words can modify adjectives but not verbs, on the other hand, there are words like here and there that cannot modify adjectives. We can say The sock looks good there but not It is a there beautiful sock, however, this distinction can be useful, especially when considering adverbs like naturally that have different meanings in their different functions
Adverb
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Adjectives
9.
English articles
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Articles in the English language are the definite article the and the indefinite articles a and an. The most common determiners are the articles the and a, which specify the presence or absence of definiteness of the noun, other possible determiners include words like this, my, each and many – see English determiners. There are also cases where no determiner is required, as in the sentence John likes fast cars, or the sentence Bob likes cool trains. The definite article the is used when the referent of the phrase is assumed to be unique or known from the context. For example, in the sentence The boy with glasses was looking at the moon, it is assumed that in the context the reference can only be to one boy, the indefinite article a or an is used only with singular, countable nouns. It indicates that the referent of the phrase is one unspecified member of a class. For example, the sentence An ugly man was smoking a pipe does not refer to any specifically known ugly man or pipe, no article is used with plural or uncountable nouns when the referent is indefinite. However, in situations, the determiner some is often added. Additionally, articles are not normally used, in phrases that contain other determiners, although one can combine articles with certain other determiners, as in the many issues. With pronouns, although again certain combinations are possible, preceding noun phrases consisting of a clause or infinitive phrase. If it is required to be concise, e. g. in headlines, signs, labels, for example, rather than The mayor was attacked, a newspaper headline might say just Mayor attacked. For more information on usage, see the sections Definite article § Notes. For more cases where no article is used, see Zero article in English, in most cases, the article is the first word of its noun phrase, preceding all other adjectives and modifiers. The little old red bag held a big surprise. There are a few exceptions, however, Certain determiners, such as all, the determiner such and exclamative what precede the indefinite article. When adjectives are qualified by quite, the word quite often precedes the indefinite article, see also English determiners § Combinations of determiners and Determiners and adjectives. The only definite article in English is the word the, denoting person or thing already mentioned, under discussion, implied, the is the most commonly used word in the English language, accounting for 7% of all words. The can be used with both singular and plural nouns, with nouns of any gender, and with nouns that start with any letter and this is different from many other languages which have different articles for different genders and/or numbers
English articles
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Adjectives
10.
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
Clause
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Adjectives
11.
English clause syntax
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This article describes the syntax of clauses in the English language, that is, the ways of combining and ordering constituents such as verbs and noun phrases to form a clause. Clauses can be classified as independent and dependent, a typical sentence consists of one independent clause, possibly augmented by one or more dependent clauses. An independent clause is a simple sentence, sentences can be classified according to the purpose or function of the sentence into declarative, interrogative, exclamatory sentence or imperative. In interrogative main clauses, unless the subject is or contains the interrogative word, However such inversion is only possible with an auxiliary or copular verb, if no such verb would otherwise be present, do-support is used. In most imperative clauses the subject is absent, Eat your dinner, However imperative clauses may include the subject for emphasis, You eat your dinner. The form of the verb is the form of the verb, such as eat, write. Modal verbs do not have imperative forms, Negation uses do-support, even if the verb is be, see § Negation below. The imperative here refers to forms, constructions for other persons may be formed periphrastically, e. g. Lets go. A dependent clause may be finite, or non-finite, particular types of dependent clause include relative clauses, content clauses and adverbial clauses. In certain instances, clauses use a verb conjugated in the subjunctive mood, Clauses can be nested within each other, sometimes up to several levels. A non-finite clause is one in which the verb is in a non-finite form, namely an infinitive, past participle, or -ing form, for how these forms are made. The internal syntax of a clause is generally similar to that of a finite clause. The following types exist, bare infinitive clause, such as go to the party in the let her go to the party. To-infinitive clause, such as to go to the party, although there is no subject in such a clause, the performer of the action can be expressed with a preceding prepositional phrase using for, It would be a good idea for her to go to the party. The possibility of placing adjuncts between the to and the verb in such constructions has been the subject of dispute among prescriptive grammarians, past participial clause, such as made a cake and seen to it. This is used in forming perfect constructions, as in he has made a cake, Present participial clause, such as being in good health. This has the form as the above, but serves as a noun rather than an adjective or adverb. The pre-appending of a subject in this case is criticized by some prescriptive grammarians – see Fused participle, in certain uses, a non-finite clause contains a missing item – this may be an object or complement of the verb, or the complement of a preposition within the clause
English clause syntax
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Adjectives
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.
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
Argument (linguistics)
14.
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
Adjunct (grammar)
15.
Diminutives in Australian English
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Diminutive forms of words are commonly used in every-day Australian English. While many dialects of English make use of diminutives, Australian English uses them more extensively than any other, diminutives may be seen as slang, but many forms are used widely across the whole of society. Some forms have also spread outside Australia to other English speaking countries, there are over 5,000 identified diminutives in use in Australian English. In Australian English, diminutives are usually formed by taking the first part of a word, alternatively in some cases no ending may be added. While the form of a diminutive is arbitrary, their use follows strict rules, for example, an ambulance paramedic is called an ambo, and is never pronounced ambie or amba. The use of the -ie ending, for example in bikie, some diminutives are almost always used in preference to the original form, while some are rarely used. Others might be restricted to certain groups or locations. The use of diminutives also evolves over time with new words coming into use, some diminutives have become so common that the original form has fallen out of common usage. For example, Salvos has begun to replace the name Salvation Army to such an extent that some Australians do not recognise the Salvation Army name, deli has become so universal that delicatessen is rarely used. Some words, such as ute, from utility vehicle, a car with a back, have become universal. This is usually a display of affection and acceptance rather than belittlement, organizations and businesses will often embrace the diminutives given to them by Australians, using them in their own advertising and even registering it as a trademark. McDonalds Australia, for example, has registered and uses the name Maccas, some diminutives are rarely used, but widely recognised. For example, chalkie means teacher, however most Australians simply call a teacher a teacher, pub and hotel names in particular are often shortened. For example, pubs called the Esplanade Hotel, such as the Esplanade Hotel in St. Kilda and this list contains noteworthy and commonly understood diminutives from Australian English. Those marked ‡ are also common in British English. Barbie, a barbecue, which may refer to either the cooking apparatus itself or the event of cooking food on a barbecue, barra, a barramundi Beauty, Beaut or Bewdy, beautiful. Used in a wider sense than the beauty, e. g. fantastic or excellent. Bickie or bikkie, a biscuit, also found in big bickies, bikie, a member of a motorcycle club, with a connotation of involved in criminal activity
Diminutives in Australian English
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In Australian English utility vehicles (trucks in American English) are almost always referred to in the diminutive as a ute.
Diminutives in Australian English
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Former Australian Prime Minister
Kevin Rudd is well known for using Australian colloquialisms such as diminutives.
16.
Interrogative word
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An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as what, when, where, who, whom, why, and how. They are sometimes called wh-words, because in English most of them start with wh- and they may be used in both direct questions and in indirect questions. In English and various languages the same forms are also used as relative pronouns in certain relative clauses. A particular type of word is the interrogative particle, which serves to convert a statement into a yes–no question. Examples include est-ce que in French, ли li in Russian, czy in Polish, কি ki in Bengali, 吗 ma in Chinese, mı/mi in Turkish, such particles contrast with other interrogative words, which form what are called wh-questions rather than yes–no questions. For more information about the rules for forming questions in various languages. Ultimately, the English interrogative pronouns, derive from the Proto-Indo-European root kwo- or kwi and these underwent further sound changes and spelling changes, notably wh-cluster reductions, resulting in the initial sound being either /w/ or /h/ and the initial spelling being either wh or h. This was the result of two sound changes – /hw/ > /h/ before /uː/ and /hw/ > /w/ otherwise – and the change from hw to wh in Middle English. In how, the w merged into the lave of the word, as it did in Old Frisian hū, hō, in English, the gradual change of voiceless stops into voiceless fricatives during the development of Germanic languages is responsible for wh- of interrogatives. Although some varieties of American English and various Scottish dialects still preserve the original sound, other interrogative words, such as which, how, where, whence, or whither, derive either from compounds, or other words from the same root. Most English interrogative words can take the suffix -ever, to words such as whatever and wherever. These words have the main meanings, As more emphatic interrogative words, often expressing disbelief or puzzlement in mainly rhetorical questions. To form free relative clauses, as in Ill do whatever you do, Whoever challenges us shall be punished, in this use, the nominal -ever words can be regarded as indefinite pronouns or as relative pronouns. To form adverbial clauses with the meaning no matter where/who/etc, wherever they hide, I will find them. A frequent class of words in several other languages is the interrogative verb, Korean. Weather-nominative be_how-politeness fifth level-interrogative suffix Hows the weather, mongolian, Chi yaa-vch jaahan huuhed bish gej bi bod-jii-ne You do_what-concessive small child not that I think-progressive-nonpast Whatever you do, I think you’re not a small child
Interrogative word
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Adjectives
17.
English determiners
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An important role in English grammar is played by determiners – words or phrases that precede a noun or noun pahrase and serve to express its reference in the context. The most common of these are the definite and indefinite articles, the, other determiners in English include demonstratives such as this and that, possessives such as my and the boys, and quantifiers such as all, many and three. In many contexts the presence of some determiner is required in order to form a complete noun phrase, however, in some cases complete noun phrases are formed without any determiner, as in the sentence Apples are fruit. Determiners can also be used in combinations, as in my many friends or all the chairs. also him, her. The terminology used in accounts of English grammar to refer to determiners is very varied, sometimes the term is not used at all, and the words classed here as determiners are classed as adjectives. In other cases, there is a related but distinct form, for example. An alternative term is phrasal determiners, the demonstratives this and that, with respective plural forms these and those. Possessives, including those corresponding to pronouns – my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose – and these can be made more emphatic with the addition of own or very own. Relative determiners, which, also whichever and whatever, indefinite determiners, The indefinite article a or an. The word some, pronounced, used as an equivalent of the article with plural. The strong form of some, pronounced, as in Some people prefer dry wine, for words such as certain and other see below. The word any, often used in negative and interrogative contexts in place of the article-equivalent some and it can also be used to express alternative. Quantifiers, which quantify a noun, Basic words indicating a large or small quantity, much/many, little/few, where two forms are given, the first is used with non-count nouns and the second with count nouns. The basic forms can be modified with adverbs, especially very, too, note that unmodified much is quite rarely used in affirmative statements in colloquial English. Phrases expressing similar meanings to the above, a lot of, lots of, plenty of, words and phrases expressing some unspecified or probably quite small amount, a few/a little, several, a couple of, a bit of, a number of etc. Cardinal numbers, zero, one, two, etc, in some analyses, these may not be treated as determiners. Other phrases expressing precise quantity, a pair of, five litres of, words and phrases expressing multiples or fractions, half, half of, double, twice, three times, twice as much, etc. Those like double and half are used in combination with definite determiners
English determiners
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Adjectives
18.
English compound
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A compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme. The English language, like others, uses compounds frequently. English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the classes or the semantic relationship of their components. Most English compound nouns are noun phrases that include a noun modified by adjectives or noun adjuncts, due to the English tendency towards conversion, the two classes are not always easily distinguished. Most English compound nouns that consist of more than two words can be constructed recursively by combining two words at a time, combining science and fiction, and then combining the resulting compound with writer, for example, can construct the compound science fiction writer. As in other Germanic languages, the compounds may be arbitrarily long, however, this is obscured by the fact that the written representation of long compounds always contains spaces. Solid compounds most likely consist of units that often have been established in the language for a long time. Examples are housewife, lawsuit, wallpaper, basketball, etc, the hyphenated form in which two or more words are connected by a hyphen. Compounds that contain affixes, such as house-build and single-mind, as well as adjective-adjective compounds and verb-verb compounds, such as blue-green, compounds that contain articles, prepositions or conjunctions, such as rent-a-cop, mother-of-pearl and salt-and-pepper, are also often hyphenated. The open or spaced form consisting of combinations of usually longer words, such as distance learning, player piano, lawn tennis. In general, the meaning of a noun is a specialization of the meaning of its head. The modifier limits the meaning of the head and this is most obvious in descriptive compounds, in which the modifier is used in an attributive or appositional manner. A blackboard is a kind of board, which is black. In determinative compounds, however, the relationship is not attributive, for example, a footstool is not a particular type of stool that is like a foot. Rather, it is a stool for ones foot or feet, in a similar manner, an office manager is the manager of an office, an armchair is a chair with arms, and a raincoat is a coat against the rain. These relationships, which are expressed by prepositions in English, would be expressed by grammatical case in other languages, however, in another common type of compound, the exocentric or, the semantic head is not explicitly expressed. A redhead, for example, is not a kind of head, similarly, a blockhead is also not a head, but a person with a head that is as hard and unreceptive as a block. And a lionheart is not a type of heart, but a person with a heart like a lion, note in general the way to tell the two apart, Can you paraphrase the meaning of the compound to A person/thing that is a Y, or
English compound
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Adjectives
19.
Portmanteau
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In linguistics, a portmanteau is defined as a single morph that represents two or more morphemes. A portmanteau also differs from a compound, which not involve the truncation of parts of the stems of the blended words. For instance, starfish is a compound, not a portmanteau, of star and fish, whereas a hypothetical portmanteau of star and fish might be stish. Humpty Dumpty explains the practice of combining words in various ways by telling Alice, for instance, take the two words fuming and furious. Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, in then-contemporary English, a portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections. The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter, to carry, in modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like. It has also used especially in Europe as a formal description for hat racks from the French words porter. An occasional synonym for portmanteau word is frankenword, an autological word exemplifying the phenomenon it describes, blending Frankenstein, many neologisms are examples of blends, but many blends have become part of the lexicon. In Punch in 1896, the word brunch was introduced as a portmanteau word, in 1964, the newly independent African republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar chose the portmanteau word Tanzania as its name. Similarly Eurasia is a portmanteau of Europe and Asia, a scientific example is a liger, which is a cross between a male lion and a female tiger. Jeoportmanteau. is a category on the American television quiz show Jeopardy. The categorys name is itself a portmanteau of the words Jeopardy, responses in the category are portmanteaus constructed by fitting two words together. The term gerrymander has itself contributed to portmanteau terms bjelkemander and playmander, oxbridge is a common portmanteau for the UKs two oldest universities, those of Oxford and Cambridge. Many portmanteau words receive some use but do not appear in all dictionaries, for example, a spork is an eating utensil that is a combination of a spoon and a fork, and a skort is an item of clothing that is part skirt, part shorts. On the other hand, turducken, a made by inserting a chicken into a duck. Similarly, the word refudiate was first used by Sarah Palin when she misspoke, though initially a gaffe, the word was recognized as the New Oxford American Dictionarys Word of the Year in 2010. The business lexicon is replete with newly coined portmanteau words like permalance, advertainment, advertorial, infotainment, a company name may also be portmanteau as well as a product name. By contrast, the public, including the media, use portmanteaux to refer to their favorite pairings as a way to. giv people an essence of who they are within the same name and this is particularly seen in cases of fictional and real-life supercouples
Portmanteau
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A
spork
Portmanteau
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The original "
Gerrymander " pictured in an 1812 cartoon. The word is a portmanteau of Massachusetts Governor
Elbridge Gerry 's name with
"salamander."
20.
English conditional sentences
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The condition clause is a dependent clause, most commonly headed by the conjunction if, while the consequence is contained in the main clause of the sentence. Different types of conditional sentences require the use of verb forms to express the condition. In English language teaching the most common patterns are referred to as first conditional, second conditional and third conditional, there is also a zero conditional, for more general information about the uses of verb tenses, moods and aspects in English, see Uses of English verb forms. In English conditional sentences, the clause is a dependent clause. Other conjunctions or equivalent expressions may also be used, such as unless, provided, providing, certain condition clauses can also be formulated using inversion without any conjunction, see § Inversion in condition clauses below. The apodosis, expressing the consequence of the condition, is generally the main clause of the sentence. Depending on the type, it may be a statement, question. It may appear before or after the condition clause, If I see him, I will tell him if I see him. If you saw him, would you tell him, would you tell him if you saw him. If you see it, photograph it, photograph it if you see it. As with other dependent clauses in English, it is common for a comma to be used to separate the clauses if the dependent clause comes first, see Comma § Separation of clauses. It is possible for the clause to appear alone in a sentence, without a condition clause. It may also be shortened by verb phrase ellipsis, a conditional sentence could therefore be something like Would you. Zero conditional refers to sentences that express a factual implication. If the alarm goes off, theres a fire somewhere in the building, If you are going to sit an exam tomorrow, go to bed early tonight. If aspirins will cure it, Ill take a couple tonight, when you make a mistake, someone lets you know. The first of these sentences is a zero conditional with both clauses in the present tense. The fourth is an example of the use of will in a condition clause, the use of verb tenses, moods and aspects in the parts of such sentences follows general principles, as described in Uses of English verb forms
English conditional sentences
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Adjectives
21.
Conjunction (grammar)
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In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjoining construction. The term discourse marker is used for conjunctions joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of parts of speech. In general, a conjunction is a grammatical particle and it may or may not stand between the items in a conjunction. The definition may also be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit with the function, e. g. as well as. A simple literary example of a conjunction, the truth of nature, conjunctions may be placed at the beginning of sentences, But some superstition about the practice persists. Coordinating conjunctions, also called coordinators, are conjunctions that join, or coordinate, in English, the mnemonic acronym FANBOYS can be used to remember the coordinators for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. These are not the only coordinating conjunctions, various others are used, including and nor, but nor, or nor, neither, no more, types of coordinating conjunctions include cumulative conjunctions, adversative conjunctions, alternative conjunctions, and illative conjunctions. He is not only handsome, but also brilliant, not only is he handsome, but also he is brilliant. Neither the basketball team nor the team is doing well. Both the cross team and the swimming team are doing well. You must decide whether you stay or you go, just as many Americans love basketball, so many Canadians love ice hockey. The more you practice dribbling, the better you will be at it, football is as fast as hockey. Football is as much an addiction as it is a sport, no sooner did she learn to ski, than the snow began to thaw. I would rather swim than surf, subordinating conjunctions, also called subordinators, are conjunctions that join an independent clause and a dependent clause, and also introduce adverb clauses. Complementizers can be considered to be special subordinating conjunctions that introduce complement clauses, I wonder whether hell be late. I hope that hell be on time, some subordinating conjunctions, when used to introduce a phrase instead of a full clause, become prepositions with identical meanings. In many verb-final languages, subordinate clauses must precede the main clause on which they depend, in this sense, the subordinate clauses of these languages have much in common with postpositional phrases
Conjunction (grammar)
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Adjectives
22.
Great Vowel Shift
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The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in England between 1350 and 1600. Through the Great Vowel Shift, all Middle English long vowels changed their pronunciation, English spelling was becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist and Anglicist, the main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English is in the value of the long vowels. Long vowels in Middle English had continental values, much like those in Italian and Standard German, the change in pronunciation is known as the Great Vowel Shift. This timeline shows the vowel changes that occurred between late Middle English in the year 1400 and Received Pronunciation in the mid-20th century by using representative words. The Great Vowel Shift occurred in the half of the table. The changes that happened after 1600 are not usually considered part of the Great Vowel Shift proper, Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet, Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels, /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/. The vowels occurred in the bite, meet, meat, mate, boat, boot. The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from their pronunciations in Modern English. In addition, Middle English had a long /ɛː/ in beat, like modern short e in bed but pronounced longer, after around 1300, the long vowels of Middle English began changing in pronunciation. The two close vowels, /iː uː/, became diphthongs, and the five, /eː ɛː aː ɔː oː/. The changes are known as the Great Vowel Shift and they occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels /iː uː/ and the close-mid vowels /eː oː/, /eː oː/ were raised to /iː uː/, and /iː uː/ became the diphthongs /ei ou/ or /əi əu/. The second phase affected the open vowel /aː/ and the open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/, /aː ɛː ɔː/ were raised, the Great Vowel Shift changed vowels without merger so Middle English before the vowel shift had the same number of vowel phonemes as Early Modern English after the vowel shift. After the Great Vowel Shift, some vowel phonemes began merging, immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels of meet and meat were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as /miːt/. This is a picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English and todays English. Pronunciations in 1400,1500,1600, and 1900 are shown, to hear recordings of the sounds, click the phonetic symbols. Before labial consonants and also after /j/, /uː/ did not shift, the first phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close-mid vowels /eː oː/, as in beet and boot, and the close vowels /iː uː/, as in bite and out
Great Vowel Shift
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23.
English honorifics
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In the English language, an English honorific is a form of address indicating respect. There are many forms of honorifics that are used when one addresses the members of the nobility, clergy, or royalty, some honorifics distinguish the sex of the person being referred to. Some titles of nobility and professional honorifics, such as the traditionally male-only Doctor or General, do not have gender-specific versions, Master, for boys or young men and as a title for the heir apparent of a Scottish baron or viscount. It may also be used as a title, e. g. for the master of a college or the master of a merchant ship. Mr, for men, regardless of status, who do not have another professional or academic title. Miss, for girls, unmarried women and married women who continue to use their maiden name, in the UK, it is used in schools to address female teachers, regardless of marital status. It is also used, without a name, to girls or young women and to address female shop assistants. Mrs, for married women who do not have professional or academic title. The varient Missus is used in the UK to address a woman whose name is unknown, Ms, for women, regardless of marital status or when marital status is unknown. Mx, a recent innovation, used as an honorific or for those who do not identify as male or female. Sir, for men, formally if they have a British knighthood or if they are a baronet or generally as a term of respect or flattery. Also used in schools, most tend not to call male teachers Mr ___. Gentleman, Originally a social rank, standing below an esquire, the term can now refer to any man of good, courteous conduct. It is only used as an honorific form of address in the plural. Sire, a term of address for a monarch, previously could be used for a person in a position of authority in general or a lord. Mistress is a form of address for a woman, equivalent to Mrs. Used on its own. The titles Mrs, Miss and Ms are abbreviations derived from Mistress, Madam or Maam, for women, a term of general respect or flattery. Originally used only to a woman of rank or authority, may also refer to a female pimp
English honorifics
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Adjectives
24.
Idiom
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An idiom is a phrase or a fixed expression that has a figurative, or sometimes literal, meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, a figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. There are thousands of idioms, occurring frequently in all languages and it is estimated that there are at least twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions in the English language. Many idiomatic expressions, in their use, were not figurative but had literal meaning. If the jars were spilled before the counting of votes was complete, anyone would be able to see which jar had more beans, over time, the practice was discontinued and the idiom became figurative. Break a leg, used as a way of wishing good luck in a performance or presentation. By wishing someone bad luck, it is supposed that the opposite will occur, in linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality. That compositionality is the key notion for the analysis of idioms is emphasized in most accounts of idioms and this principle states that the meaning of a whole should be constructed from the meanings of the parts that make up the whole. In other words, one should be in a position to understand the whole if one understands the meanings of each of the parts that make up the whole, the following example is widely employed to illustrate the point, Fred kicked the bucket. Understood compositionally, Fred has literally kicked an actual, physical bucket, the much more likely idiomatic reading, however, is non-compositional, Fred is understood to have died. Arriving at the reading from the literal reading is unlikely for most speakers. What this means is that the reading is, rather. In phraseology, idioms are defined as a sub-type of phraseme, john Saeed defines an idiom as collocated words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term. This collocation of words redefines each component word in the word-group, idioms usually do not translate well, in some cases, when an idiom is translated directly word-for-word into another language, either its meaning is changed or it is meaningless. When two or three words are used together in a particular sequence, the words are said to be irreversible binomials. Usage will prevent the words from being displaced or rearranged, for example, a person may be left high and dry but never dry and high. This idiom in turn means that the person is left in their condition rather than being assisted so that their condition improves. Not all Siamese twins are idioms, however, chips and dip is an irreversible binomial, but it refers to literal food items, not idiomatic ones
Idiom
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Adjectives
Idiom
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Love is blind
25.
Interjection
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In linguistics, an interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction. The category is quite heterogeneous, and includes such things as exclamations, curses, greetings, response particles, due to its heterogeneous nature, the category of interjections partly overlaps with categories like profanities, discourse markers and fillers. Interjections may be subdivided and classified in several ways, further distinctions can be made based on function. Interjections can take different forms and meanings across cultures. For instance, the English interjections gee and wow have no equivalent in Polish. Curses likewise are famously language-specific and colourful, on the other hand, interjections that manage social interaction may be more similar across languages. For instance, the word Huh. used when one has not caught what someone just said, is similar in 31 spoken languages around the world. Similar observations have made for the interjections Oh. and Mm/m-hm. Across languages, interjections often use special sounds and syllable types that are not commonly used in parts of the vocabulary. For instance, interjections like brr and shh. are made entirely of consonants, some, like tut-tut and ahem, are written like normal words, but their actual production involves clicks or throat-clearing. The phonetic atypicality of some interjections is one reason they have traditionally considered as lying outside the realm of language. Several English interjections contain sounds, or are sounds as opposed to words, that do not exist in regular English phonological inventory. For example, Ahem, or, may contain a stop or a in any dialect of English, the glottal stop is common in American English, some British dialects. Gah, ends with, which does not occur with regular English words, psst is an entirely consonantal syllable, and its consonant cluster does not occur initially in regular English words. Shh is another entirely consonantal syllable word, tut-tut, also spelled tsk-tsk, is made up entirely of clicks, which are an active part of regular speech in several African languages. Ugh ends with a velar consonant, which is otherwise restricted to just a few regional dialects of English, though is common in languages like Spanish, German, Gaelic. Whew or phew, ɸju, also spelled shew, may start with a bilabial fricative and this sound is a common phoneme in such languages as Suki and Ewe and Logba. Yeah ends with the vowel, or in some dialects the vowel or tensed
Interjection
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Adjectives
26.
Pronoun
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In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase. It is a case of a pro-form. Pronouns have traditionally regarded as one of the parts of speech. Subtypes include personal pronouns, reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, possessive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative pronouns, interrogative pronouns, the use of pronouns often involves anaphora, where the meaning of the pronoun is dependent on an antecedent. This applies especially to third-person personal pronouns, and to relative pronouns, for example, in the sentence That poor man looks as if he needs a new coat, the antecedent of the pronoun he is the noun phrase that poor man. The adjective associated with pronoun is pronominal, a pronominal is also a word or phrase that acts as a pronoun. For example, in Thats not the one I wanted, the phrase the one is a pronominal, personal pronouns may be classified by person, number, gender and case. English has three persons and two numbers, in the person singular there are also distinct pronoun forms for male, female. Principal forms are shown in the adjacent table, English personal pronouns have two cases, subject and object. Subject pronouns are used in subject position, object pronouns are used for the object of a verb or preposition. Other distinct forms found in some languages include, Second person informal and formal pronouns, like tu, there is no such distinction in standard modern English, though Elizabethan English marked the distinction with thou and you, and this is preserved in some dialects. Inclusive and exclusive first person pronouns, which indicate whether or not the audience is included. There is no distinction in English. Intensive pronouns, which re-emphasize a noun or pronoun that has already been mentioned, English uses the same forms as the reflexive pronouns, for example, I did it myself. Direct and indirect object pronouns, such as le and lui in French, English uses the same form for both, for example, Mary loves him, Mary sent him a letter. Prepositional pronouns, used after a preposition, English uses ordinary object pronouns here, Mary looked at him. Disjunctive pronouns, used in isolation or in other special grammatical contexts. No distinct forms exist in English, for example, Who does this belong to, strong and weak forms of certain pronouns, found in some languages such as Polish
Pronoun
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Adjectives
27.
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
Phrase
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Adjectives
Phrase
Phrase
28.
English plurals
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English nouns are inflected for grammatical number, meaning that if they are of the countable type, they generally have different forms for singular and plural. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns, phonological transcriptions provided in this article are for Received Pronunciation and General American. For more information, see English phonology, the plural morpheme in English is suffixed to the end of most nouns. The spelling adds -es, or -s if the singular ends in -e, When the singular form ends in a voiceless consonant —/p/, /t/, /k/. The spelling adds -s, For all other words the regular plural adds /z/, represented orthographically by -s, Phonologically, However, certain complications arise in the spelling of certain plurals, as described below. With place names this rule is not always adhered to, Germanys, nor does the rule apply to words that are merely capitalized common nouns, P&O Ferries. Other exceptions include lay-bys and stand-bys, words ending in a y preceded by a vowel form their plurals by adding -s, However the plural form of money is usually monies, although moneys is also found. In Old and Middle English voiceless fricatives /f/, /θ/ mutated to voiced fricatives before a voiced ending, in some words this voicing survives in the modern English plural. Some nouns have identical singular and plural, many of these are the names of animals, bison buffalo deer duck fish pike salmon sheep squid swine trout The plural deers is listed in some dictionaries. Eric Partridge refers to these terms as snob plurals and conjectures that they may have developed by analogy with the common English irregular plural animal words deer, sheep. Similarly, nearly all kinds of fish have no plural form. As to the fish itself, the plural is usually identical to the singular, although fishes is sometimes used. Fishes is also used in contexts, such as the Bible story of the loaves and fishes, or the reference in The Godfather. Other nouns that have or may have singular and plural forms include, aircraft, watercraft, spacecraft, hovercraft. But in the sense of a skill or art, the plural is regular, the blues cannon chassis counsel head iris series, species. English sometimes distinguishes between regular plural forms of demonyms/ethnonyms, and uncountable plurals used to refer to entire nationalities collectively, the plurals of a few nouns are formed from the singular by adding -n or -en, stemming from the Old English weak declension. In the same context, multiple VAX computers are sometimes called Vaxen particularly if operating as a cluster, There are many compounds of man and woman that form their plurals in the same way, postmen, policewomen, etc. The plural of mongoose is mongooses, mongeese is a back-formation by mistaken analogy to goose / geese and is often used in a jocular context
English plurals
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Adjectives
29.
English possessive
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In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns, nouns, noun phrases and some pronouns generally form a possessive with the suffix -s. This form is called the Saxon genitive, reflecting the suffixs derivation from a genitive case ending in Old English. Personal pronouns, however, have irregular possessives, and most of them have different forms for possessive determiners and possessive pronouns, such as my and mine or your and yours. Possessives are one of the means by which genitive constructions are formed in modern English, the Chicago Manual of Style recommends this more modern style, while stating that adding just an apostrophe is also correct. The Elements of Style and the Canadian Press Stylebook prefer the form in -ss with the exception of Biblical and classical proper names, for more on style guidance for this and other issues relating to the construction of possessives in English, see Possessive apostrophe. More generally, the -s morpheme can be attached to the last word of a noun phrase, scientific terminology, in particular, the Latin names for stars uses the Latin genitive form of the name of the constellation. Thus Alpha Centauri, where Centauri is the genitive of constellation name Centaurus, unlike with other noun phrases which only have a single possessive form, personal pronouns in English have two possessive forms, possessive determiners and possessive pronouns. In most cases these are different from each other, the archaic thou has thy and thine. For a full table and further details, see English personal pronouns, the interrogative and relative pronoun who has the possessive whose. In its relative use, whose can also refer to inanimate antecedents, other pronouns that form possessives do so in the same way as nouns, with -s, for example ones, somebodys. Certain pronouns, such as the demonstratives this, that, these, Possessive noun phrases such as Johns can be used as determiners. When a form corresponding to a personal pronoun is used as a possessive determiner, Possessive determiners are not used in combination with articles or other definite determiners. Possessive determiners can nonetheless be combined with certain quantifiers, as in my six hats, see English determiners for more details. A possessive adjective can be intensified with the own, which can itself be either an adjective or a pronoun, my own. In some expressions the possessive has itself taken on the role of a noun modifier, as in cows milk. It then no longer functions as a determiner, adjectives and determiners can be placed before it, as in the cows milk. Possessives can also play the role of nouns or pronouns, namely they can stand alone as a noun phrase, in this role they can function as the subject or object of verbs, or as a complement of prepositions
English possessive
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Adjectives
30.
Preposition and postposition
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Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions, are a class of words that express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles. A preposition or postposition typically combines with a noun or pronoun, or more generally a noun phrase, a preposition comes before its complement, a postposition comes after its complement. Some languages, which use a different word order, have postpositions instead, the phrase formed by a preposition or postposition together with its complement is called a prepositional phrase – such phrases usually play an adverbial role in a sentence. A less common type of adposition is the circumposition, which consists of two parts that appear on side of the complement. Other terms sometimes used for types of adposition include ambiposition, inposition and interposition. Some linguists use the preposition in place of adposition regardless of the applicable word order. The word preposition comes from Latin, prae and Latin, ponere and this refers to the situation in Latin and Greek, where such words are placed before their complement, and are hence pre-positioned. In some languages, including Sindhi, Urdu, Turkish, Hindi, Korean, and Japanese, to indicate this, they are called postpositions. There are also cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement, this is called a circumposition. Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions are collectively known as adpositions, however, some linguists prefer to use the well-known and longer established term preposition in place of adposition, irrespective of position relative to the complement. An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement, most often a noun phrase, in English, this is generally a noun, together with its specifier and modifiers such as articles, adjectives, etc. The complement is called the object of the adposition. The resulting phrase, formed by the adposition together with its complement, is called a phrase or prepositional phrase. An adposition establishes a relationship that links its complement to another word or phrase in the context. It also generally establishes a relationship, which may be spatial, temporal. Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below, in each case, the prepositional phrase appears in italics, and the preposition within it appears in bold. The word to which the phrase expresses a relation – that is, in some of the examples, the same word has two prepositional phrases as adjuncts. As an adjunct to a noun, the weather in March cheese from France with live bacteria As a predicative expression The key is under the stone, prepositional phrases themselves are sometimes nominalized, In the cellar was chosen as the best place to hide the bodies
Preposition and postposition
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Adjectives
31.
Abbreviations
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An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase. It consists of a group of letters taken from the word or phrase, a contraction is an abbreviation, but an abbreviation is not necessarily a contraction. Acronyms and initialisms are regarded as subsets of abbreviations and they are abbreviations that consist of the initial letters or parts of words. Abbreviations have a history, created so that spelling out a whole word could be avoided. This might be done to time and space, and also to provide secrecy. Shortened words were used and initial letters were used to represent words in specific applications. In classical Greece and Rome, the reduction of words to single letters was common, in Roman inscriptions, Words were commonly abbreviated by using the initial letter or letters of words, and most inscriptions have at least one abbreviation. However, some could have more than one meaning, depending on their context, Abbreviations in English were frequently used from its earliest days. Manuscripts of copies of the old English poem Beowulf used many abbreviations, for example 7 or & for and, the standardisation of English in the 15th through 17th centuries included such a growth in the use of abbreviations. At first, abbreviations were sometimes represented with various suspension signs, for example, sequences like ‹er› were replaced with ‹ɔ›, as in ‹mastɔ› for master and ‹exacɔbate› for exacerbate. While this may seem trivial, it was symptomatic of an attempt by people manually reproducing academic texts to reduce the copy time, an example from the Oxford University Register,1503, Mastɔ subwardenɔ y ɔmēde me to you. And wherɔ y wrot to you the last wyke that y trouyde itt good to differrɔ thelectionɔ ovɔ to quīdenaɔ tinitatis y have be thougħt me synɔ that itt woll be thenɔ a bowte mydsomɔ. The Early Modern English period, between the 15th and 17th centuries, had abbreviations like ye for Þe, used for the word the, hence, by later misunderstanding, during the growth of philological linguistic theory in academic Britain, abbreviating became very fashionable. The use of abbreviation for the names of J. R. R. Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis, but before that, many Britons were more scrupulous at maintaining the French form. In French, the period follows a abbreviation if the last letter in the abbreviation is not the last letter of its antecedent. Like many other cross-channel linguistic acquisitions, many Britons readily took this up and followed this rule themselves, while the Americans took a simpler rule and applied it rigorously. Over the years, however, the lack of convention in some style guides has made it difficult to determine which two-word abbreviations should be abbreviated with periods and which should not. The U. S. media tend to use periods in two-word abbreviations like United States, many British publications have gradually done away with the use of periods in abbreviations
Abbreviations
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Example of
Latin text with abbreviations
Abbreviations
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Road sign in China—"km" is a symbol, not an abbreviation, as it is not a contraction of a Chinese word
32.
English verbs
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Verbs constitute one of the main word classes in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflected, most combinations of tense, aspect, mood and voice are expressed periphrastically, using constructions with auxiliary verbs. Most verbs inflect in a regular fashion, although there are about 200 irregular verbs. The copula verb be has a number of different inflected forms. For details of the uses of verb tenses and other forms. For certain other topics, see the articles listed in the adjacent box. A regular English verb has only one part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived. This is the form or dictionary form. For example, from the base form exist, all the forms of the verb can be predictably derived. The base form is called the bare infinitive, another common way of referring to verbs is to use the to-infinitive. Most irregular verbs have three parts, since the simple past and past participle are unpredictable. For example, the verb write has the principal parts write, wrote, and written, note that some irregular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms, as with send–sent–sent. The verbs do, say and have additionally have irregular third person present tense forms. The copular verb be is irregular, with the forms be, am, is, are, was, were, been. On the other hand, modal verbs are verbs, being used only in a limited number of forms. For details on the forms of verbs of these types, see § Copular, auxiliary, the base form or plain form of a verb is not marked by any inflectional ending. There are certain suffixes that are frequently used to form verbs, such as -ate, -fy. Many verbs also contain prefixes, such un-, out-, over-, some verbs are formed from nouns and adjectives by conversion, as with the verbs snare, nose, dry, and calm
English verbs
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Adjectives
33.
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
34.
English irregular verbs
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The English language has a large number of irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use—and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense or the past participle, the other inflected parts of the verb—the third person singular present indicative in -s, and the present participle and gerund form in -ing—are formed regularly in most cases. There are a few exceptions, the verb be has irregular forms throughout the present tense, the verbs have, do and say have irregular -s forms, the irregular verbs include many of the most common verbs, the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an irregular verb. Irregular verbs in Modern English typically derive from verbs that followed more regular patterns at a stage in the history of the language. The regular verbs, on the hand, with their preterites and past participles ending in -ed, follow the weak conjugation. Nonetheless, there are many irregular verbs that follow or partially follow the weak conjugation. For information on the conjugation of verbs in English, as well as other points concerning verb usage. Most English irregular verbs are native, derived from verbs that existed in Old English, nearly all verbs that have been borrowed into the language at a later stage have defaulted to the regular conjugation. There are a few exceptions, however, such as the verb catch, most irregular verbs exist as remnants of historical conjugation systems. When some grammatical rule became changed or disused, some verbs kept to the old pattern. For example, before the Great Vowel Shift, the verb keep belonged to a group of verbs whose vowel was shortened in the past tense, Verbs such as peep, which have similar form but arose after the Vowel Shift, take the regular -ed ending. The force of analogy tends to reduce the number of irregular verbs over time and this is more likely to occur with less common verbs, hence it is often the more common verbs that tend to remain irregular. Many verbs today have coexisting irregular and regular forms, a sign that the form might be on the wane. In a few cases, however, analogy has operated in the other direction, the verb forms described in this article are chiefly those that are accepted in standard English, many regional dialects have different irregular forms. In particular, it is common in some types of non-standard speech to use past tenses as past participles. The irregular verbs of Modern English form several groups with similar conjugation pattern and these can be broadly grouped into two classes – the Germanic weak and strong groups – although historically some verbs have moved between these groups. There are also a few cases, the verbs be and go, which demonstrate suppletion, the verb do
English irregular verbs
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Adjectives
35.
English modal verbs
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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 verbs
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Adjectives
36.
English modals of deduction
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The English modal verbs must, have to, have got to, cant and couldnt are used to express deduction and contention. Modal verbs are used to state how sure the speaker is about something, must can be used when the speaker feels sure that something is real because he sees strong evidence of it. Youre shivering => you must be cold, must have is used with a past participle when the speaker is not totally sure about something. Someone must have taken the key, because it is not here and this has to be a mistake. These arent mine, theyve got to be yours, cant is used to say that the speaker thinks something is not right. All the doors and windows are locked, cant have + past participle is used for things that the speaker is sure did not occur in the past. I cant have left my phone at work and you called me when I was running to my car. You cant have seen him this morning and he was with me all the time. She cant have liked the show, if he wasnt there, he couldnt have committed the murder. Modals – deduction learnenglish. britishcouncil. org Oxford Practice Grammar, George Yule, Oxford University Press ISBN9780194327541 Page,40 Modals Deduction Past ecenglish. com
English modals of deduction
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Adjectives
37.
English passive voice
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The passive voice is a grammatical construction. The noun or noun phrase that would be the object of an active sentence appears as the subject of a sentence or clause in the passive voice, the subject of a sentence or clause featuring the passive voice typically denotes the recipient of the action rather than the performer. The passive voice in English is formed periphrastically, the construction uses the auxiliary verb be together with the past participle of the main verb. For example, Caesar was stabbed by Brutus is in the passive voice, the subject, Caesar, indicates the person acted upon. The agent is expressed here with the phrase by Brutus, the equivalent sentence in the active voice is Brutus stabbed Caesar, in which the subject denotes the doer, or agent, Brutus. A sentence featuring the voice is sometimes called a passive sentence. English allows a number of constructions which are not possible in many of the other languages with similar passive formation. These include promotion of an object to subject and promotion of the complement of a preposition. Use of the passive in English varies with writing style and field, some publications style sheets discourage use of the passive voice, while others encourage it. Although some purveyors of usage advice, including George Orwell in Politics, the passive voice is a specific grammatical construction. The essential components, in English, are a form of the verb be. The agent may be specified using a phrase with the preposition by. It can be used in a number of different grammatical contexts, for instance, in declarative, interrogative, and imperative clauses, for example, Being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. Have you ever been kicked by an elephant, is not passive voice, because excited here is not a verb form, but an adjective denoting a state. See § Stative and adjectival uses below, though the passive can be used for the purpose of concealing the agent, this is not a valid way of identifying the passive, and many other grammatical constructions can be used to accomplish this. Not every expression that serves to take away from the performer of an action is an instance of passive voice. Are both in the active voice, occasionally, authors express recommendations about use of the passive unclearly or misapply the term passive voice to include sentences of this type. As he read this, he betrayed no sense of how absurd it was to use the voice in regard to his scheme
English passive voice
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Adjectives
38.
Phrasal verb
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The term phrasal verb is commonly applied to two or three distinct but related constructions in English, a verb and a particle and/or a preposition co-occur forming a single semantic unit. This semantic unit cannot be based upon the meanings of the individual parts in isolation. In other words, the meaning is non-compositional and thus unpredictable, phrasal verbs that include a preposition are known as prepositional verbs and phrasal verbs that include a particle are also known as particle verbs. Additional alternative terms for phrasal verb are compound verb, verb-adverb combination, verb-particle construction, two-part word/verb, and three-part word/verb, there are at least three main types of phrasal verb constructions depending on whether the verb combines with a preposition, a particle, or both. The words constituting the phrasal verb constructions in the examples are in bold. Who is looking after the kids, – after is a preposition that introduces the prepositional phrase after the kids. – on is a preposition that introduces the phrase on nobody. I ran into an old friend, – into is a preposition that introduces the prepositional phrase into an old friend. – after is a preposition that introduces the phrase after her mother. – for is a preposition that introduces the phrase for a linguist. You should stand by your friend, – by is a preposition that introduces the prepositional phrase by your friend. – up is a particle, not a preposition, – over is a particle, not a preposition. Why does he always dress down, – down is a particle, not a preposition. You should not give in so quickly, – in is a particle, not a preposition. Where do they want to hang out, – out is a particle, not a preposition. She handed it in. – in is a particle, not a preposition, Verb + particle + preposition a. Who can put up with that, – up is a particle and with is a preposition. She is looking forward to a rest, – forward is a particle and to is a preposition
Phrasal verb
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Adjectives
39.
English subjunctive
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The subjunctive in English is used to form sentences that do not describe known objective facts. These include statements about ones state of mind, such as opinion, belief, purpose, intention and it contrasts with the indicative mood, which is used for statements of fact, such as He speaks English. In Modern English, the form of a verb often looks identical to the indicative form. For most verbs, the only distinct subjunctive form is found in the person singular of the present tense. However, the verb be has not only a present subjunctive. These two tenses of the subjunctive have no connection in meaning with present and past time. English has present subjunctive and past subjunctive forms, which are similar to the present indicative. Note that these terms are used merely as names for forms that verbs take. The present subjunctive is identical to the infinitive of the verb in all forms. This means that, for almost all verbs, the present subjunctive differs from the present indicative only in the person singular form. Present subjunctive forms are negated by placing the word not before them, verbs other than be are described as lacking a past subjunctive, or possibly as having a past subjunctive identical in form to the past indicative, I owned, I did not own. Certain subjunctives can also be distinguished from indicatives by the possibility of inversion with the subject, the auxiliary and present subjunctive do is rarely used, perchance as an emphatic form. As a present subjunctive, it is identical to the infinitive, is accompanied by a bare infinitive. The negated present subjunctive is always unambiguous with the person singular. The auxiliary and past subjunctive did, when not used for negation, is more frequent as an emphatic form and is conjugated the same as the indicative. Occasionally, a present perfect subjunctive is seen, as in It is important that he have completed two years of Spanish before graduation, a compound past subjunctive form is made with were followed by a verbs to-infinitive. A compound pluperfect subjunctive can be formed with were followed by to have and the verbs past participle, consequently, the English modal verbs do not have present subjunctive forms, except for synonyms such as be able to as a subjunctive corresponding to the indicative modal can. However would, should, could and might can in some contexts be regarded as past subjunctives of will, shall, can and may respectively
English subjunctive
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Adjectives
40.
Uses of English verb forms
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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
Uses of English verb forms
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Adjectives
41.
English usage controversies
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Numerous grammatical constructions in English are disputed, with a significant number of native speakers identifying a given construction as either correct or incorrect. Differences between formal and informal speech and between dialects are at the root of some of these disputes, informal speech and non-standard dialects are sometimes simply labelled as incorrect. Correct use of a register or dialect may be seen as a marker of education, culture, group identity. Various proscriptive authorities such as guides and teachers make pronouncements on the correctness of many constructions. Disputes arise when these authorities disagree with other or with actual usage by a population of speakers. On the other hand, many or all of the examples are considered correct by some sources. Generic you – e. g. Brushing your teeth is a good habit, as opposed to Brushing ones teeth is a good habit Flat adverbs – e. g. Drive safe. To boldly go where no man has gone before, as opposed to To go boldly where no man has gone before Conjunction beginning a sentence – e. g. But Mom said not to jump on the bed, double genitive – e. g. a friend of theirs as opposed to a friend of them or their friend Using me vs. I in the complement or other cases - e. g. Me and Bob vs. Bob and I Its me again, Using I vs. me in the oblique case. He gave the ball to Bob and I instead of He gave the ball to Bob and this is often called a hypercorrection, since it is perceived as related to avoidance of the stigmatized incorrect use of the oblique form. The validity of arent as a negative first-person singular conjunction for to be in interrogative uses – e. g. Arent I the one you were talking about, whether to use the subjunctive mood – e. g. I wish I were/was a better man, whether to use who or whom in various contexts. The use of less or fewer with count nouns, - not considered standard, but used for example in Southern American English. What has to happen is is that the money has to come from somewhere, ending a sentence with a preposition – e. g. You have nothing to be afraid of and you have nothing of which to be afraid. Was first criticized by grammarians in the 1600s by analogy with Latin grammar and some teachers since, order of quoted punctuation marks, i. e. American style vs
English usage controversies
–
Adjectives
42.
Latin
–
Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
Latin
–
Latin inscription, in the
Colosseum
Latin
–
Julius Caesar 's
Commentarii de Bello Gallico is one of the most famous classical Latin texts of the Golden Age of Latin. The unvarnished, journalistic style of this
patrician general has long been taught as a model of the urbane Latin officially spoken and written in the floruit of the
Roman republic.
Latin
–
A multi-volume Latin dictionary in the
University Library of Graz
Latin
–
Latin and Ancient Greek Language - Culture - Linguistics at
Duke University in 2014.
43.
Word
–
In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that can be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content. This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning, a word may consist of a single morpheme, or several, whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word. A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes, words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. The term word may refer to a word or to a written word. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, the difficulty of deciphering a word depends on the language. Dictionaries categorize a languages lexicon into lemmas and these can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a word in the opinion of the writers of that language. The most appropriate means of measuring the length of a word is by counting its syllables or morphemes, when a word has multiple definitions or multiple senses, it may result in confusion in a debate or discussion. Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of Minimal Free Forms in 1926, words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. However, some words are not minimal free forms as they make no sense by themselves. Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, according to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations. In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words are construed as bundles of features that are united into a structure with form. For example, the word koalas has semantic features, category features, number features, phonological features, the task of defining what constitutes a word involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the boundaries of spoken language should be placed, Potential pause, A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries, however, this method is not foolproof, the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words. Indivisibility, A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word, similarly, some have separable affixes, in the German sentence Ich komme gut zu Hause an, the verb ankommen is separated. Phonetic boundaries, Some languages have rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be
Word
–
Letters and words
44.
Linguistics
–
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning, phonetics is the study of speech and non-speech sounds, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties. While the study of semantics typically concerns itself with truth conditions, Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential sub-sets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology, morphology, modern theories that deal with the principles of grammar are largely based within Noam Chomskys ideological school of generative grammar. In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the notions of langue and parole in his formulation of structural linguistics. According to him, parole is the utterance of speech, whereas langue refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically defines the principles. This distinction resembles the one made by Noam Chomsky between competence and performance in his theory of transformative or generative grammar. According to Chomsky, competence is an innate capacity and potential for language, while performance is the specific way in which it is used by individuals, groups. The study of parole is the domain of sociolinguistics, the sub-discipline that comprises the study of a system of linguistic facets within a certain speech community. Discourse analysis further examines the structure of texts and conversations emerging out of a speech communitys usage of language, Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself. Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of scripts in language. Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic, research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focus on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time. Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry with linguistic inquiry, in order to describe languages, lexicography involves the documentation of words that form a vocabulary. Such a documentation of a vocabulary from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary. Computational linguistics is concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective, specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act of translation and interpretation, as well as in language education – the teaching of a second or foreign language. Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education, related areas of study also includes the disciplines of semiotics, literary criticism, translation, and speech-language pathology. Before the 20th century, the philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language
Linguistics
–
Ancient
Tamil inscription at
Thanjavur
Linguistics
–
Topics and terminology
45.
Open class (linguistics)
–
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
Open class (linguistics)
–
A diagram showing some of the posited English
syntactic categories
46.
Part of speech
–
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
Part of speech
–
A diagram showing some of the posited English
syntactic categories
47.
Subject (grammar)
–
The subject in a simple English sentence such as John runs, John is a teacher, or John was hit by a car is the person or thing about whom the statement is made, in this case John. Traditionally the subject is the word or phrase which controls the verb in the clause, if there is no verb, as in John - what an idiot. or if the verb has a different subject, as in John - I cant stand him. Then John is not considered to be the subject. For example, in the sentence It is difficult to learn French, the subject seems to be the word it. Sentences beginning with a phrase, such as There is a problem. In which the tag question isnt there, seems to imply that the subject is the adverb there, also create difficulties for the definition of subject. But there are languages such as Basque or Greenlandic, in which the form of a noun or pronoun when the verb is intransitive is different from when the verb is transitive. In these languages, which are known as ergative languages, the concept of subject may not apply at all, according to a tradition associated with predicate logic and dependency grammars, the subject is the most prominent overt argument of the predicate. By this position all languages with arguments have subjects, though there is no way to define this consistently for all languages, from a functional perspective, a subject is a phrase that conflates nominative case with the topic. Many languages do not do this, and by definition would not have subjects. All of these see the subject in English determining person and number agreement on the finite verb. The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the verb in declarative sentences in English. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech, subject-verb agreement, The subject agrees with the finite verb in person and number, e. g. Position occupied, The subject typically immediately precedes the verb in declarative clauses in English. Of these three criteria, the first one is the most reliable, the subject in English and many other languages agrees with the finite verb in person and number. The second and third criterion are merely strong tendencies that can be flouted in certain constructions, - The three criteria agree identifying Tom as the subject. - The 1st and the 3rd criteria identify Tom as the subject, - The 1st and the 2nd criteria identify Chemistry as the subject. In the first sentence, all three combine to identify Tom as the subject
Subject (grammar)
48.
Object (grammar)
–
Traditional grammar defines the object in a sentence as the entity that is acted upon by the subject. Traditional theories of sentence structure divide the simple sentence into a subject, the main verb in a clause determines whether and what objects are present. Transitive verbs require the presence of an object, whereas intransitive verbs block the appearance of an object, the term complement overlaps in meaning with object, all objects are complements, but not vice versa. The objects that verbs do and do not take is explored in detail in valency theory, various object types are commonly acknowledged, direct, indirect, and prepositional. These object types are illustrated in the table, The descriptions entity acted upon. Beyond basic examples such as provided in the table, these orientation points are not much help when the goal is to determine whether a given object should be viewed as direct or indirect. One rule of thumb for English, however, is that an object is not present unless a direct object is also present. A prepositional object is one that is introduced by a preposition, despite the difficulties with the traditional nomenclature, the terms direct object and indirect object are widespread. The term oblique object is also employed at times, although what exactly is meant varies from author to author, some understand it to be an umbrella term denoting all objects, whereas others use the term to denote just a prepositional object. Some Chinese verbs can have two objects, one being more closely bound to the verb than the other, these may be called inner and outer objects. g. Subject of passive sentence, Most objects in active sentences can become the subject in the corresponding passive sentences, position occupied, In languages with strict word order, the subject and the object tend to occupy set positions in unmarked declarative clauses. Morphological case, In languages that have case systems, objects are marked by certain cases, languages vary significantly with respect to these criteria. The first criterion identifies objects reliably most of the time in English, - Passive sentence identifies a book as an object in the starting sentence. - Passive sentence identifies me as an object in the starting sentence, the third criterion is less applicable to English, though, since English lacks morphological case, exceptions being the personal pronouns. For languages that have case and thus freer word order, morphological case is the most readily available criterion for identifying objects, in Latin and related languages, direct objects are usually marked with the accusative case, and indirect objects with the dative case. Note as well that some objects are marked in telling ways in particular languages, in Spanish, for example, human objects have to be marked by the preposition a, the phenomenon is called differential object marking. Verbs can be classified according to the number and/or type of objects that they do or do not take, the object of a transitive ergative verb is the subject of the corresponding intransitive ergative verb. With object-deletion verbs, in contrast, the subject is consistent regardless of whether an object is or is not present, objects are distinguished from subjects in the syntactic trees that represent sentence structure
Object (grammar)
49.
Verb
–
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
–
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.
50.
Preposition
–
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions, are a class of words that express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles. A preposition or postposition typically combines with a noun or pronoun, or more generally a noun phrase, a preposition comes before its complement, a postposition comes after its complement. Some languages, which use a different word order, have postpositions instead, the phrase formed by a preposition or postposition together with its complement is called a prepositional phrase – such phrases usually play an adverbial role in a sentence. A less common type of adposition is the circumposition, which consists of two parts that appear on side of the complement. Other terms sometimes used for types of adposition include ambiposition, inposition and interposition. Some linguists use the preposition in place of adposition regardless of the applicable word order. The word preposition comes from Latin, prae and Latin, ponere and this refers to the situation in Latin and Greek, where such words are placed before their complement, and are hence pre-positioned. In some languages, including Sindhi, Urdu, Turkish, Hindi, Korean, and Japanese, to indicate this, they are called postpositions. There are also cases where the function is performed by two parts coming before and after the complement, this is called a circumposition. Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions are collectively known as adpositions, however, some linguists prefer to use the well-known and longer established term preposition in place of adposition, irrespective of position relative to the complement. An adposition typically combines with exactly one complement, most often a noun phrase, in English, this is generally a noun, together with its specifier and modifiers such as articles, adjectives, etc. The complement is called the object of the adposition. The resulting phrase, formed by the adposition together with its complement, is called a phrase or prepositional phrase. An adposition establishes a relationship that links its complement to another word or phrase in the context. It also generally establishes a relationship, which may be spatial, temporal. Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below, in each case, the prepositional phrase appears in italics, and the preposition within it appears in bold. The word to which the phrase expresses a relation – that is, in some of the examples, the same word has two prepositional phrases as adjuncts. As an adjunct to a noun, the weather in March cheese from France with live bacteria As a predicative expression The key is under the stone, prepositional phrases themselves are sometimes nominalized, In the cellar was chosen as the best place to hide the bodies
Preposition
–
Adjectives
