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Topicalization is a mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause (as opposed to in a canonical position later in the sentence). This involves a phrasal movement of determiners, prepositions, and verbs to sentence-initial position. [1]
—Passive sentence identifies me as an object in the starting sentence. The second criterion is also a reliable criterion for analytic languages such as English, since the relatively strict word order of English usually positions the object after the verb(s) in declarative sentences. In the majority of languages with fixed word order, the ...
The term wh-movement stemmed from early generative grammar in the 1960s and 1970s and was a reference to the theory of transformational grammar, in which the interrogative expression always appears in its canonical position in the deep structure of a sentence but can move leftward from that position to the front of the sentence/clause in the ...
Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex. Sentence 4 is compound-complex (also known as complex-compound). Example 5 is a sentence fragment. I like trains. I don't know how to bake, so I buy my bread already made.
These examples illustrate scrambling in the midfield of a subordinate clause in German. The 'midfield' is a position within the sentence structure, with 'frontfield' and 'endfield' acting like bookends for the sentence (usually C-head/subject and V/object). The midfield is where we typically see scrambling occur in freer word order languages.
In these examples the syntactic subject position (to the left of the verb) is manned by the meaningless expletive ("it" or "there"), whose sole purpose is satisfying the extended projection principle, and is nevertheless necessary. In these sentences the topic is never the subject, but is determined pragmatically. In all these cases, the whole ...
This sentence was constructed by Noam Chomsky as an illustration that phrase structure rules are capable of generating syntactically correct but semantically incorrect sentences. Phrase structure rules break sentences down into their constituent parts. These constituents are often represented as tree structures (dendrograms). The tree for ...
In syntax, verb-second (V2) word order [1] is a sentence structure in which the finite verb of a sentence or a clause is placed in the clause's second position, so that the verb is preceded by a single word or group of words (a single constituent). Examples of V2 in English include (brackets indicating a single constituent):