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First person includes the speaker (English: I, we), second person is the person or people spoken to (English: your or you), and third person includes all that are not listed above (English: he, she, it, they). [1] It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.
Generalization of meaning: Upward shift in a taxonomy, e.g., hoover "Hoover vacuum cleaner" → "any type of vacuum cleaner". Cohyponymic transfer: Horizontal shift in a taxonomy, e.g., the confusion of mouse and rat in some dialects. Antiphrasis: Change based on a contrastive aspect of the concepts, e.g., perfect lady in the sense of "prostitute".
Syntactic change affects grammar in its morphological and syntactic aspects and is one of the types of change observed in language change. If one pays close attention to evolutions in the realms of phonology and morphology, it becomes evident that syntactic change can also be the result of profound shifts in the shape of a language.
The following types of determiners are organized, first, syntactically according to their typical position in a noun phrase in relation to each other and, then, according to their semantic contributions to the noun phrase. This first division, based on categorization from A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, includes three categories:
After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergone pejoration.
For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology , and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition , perception , or other abilities of the mind.
For example, in the English language, there was the Great Vowel Shift, a chain shift of long vowels first described and accounted for in terms of drift by Jespersen (1860–1943). Another example of drift is the tendency in English to eliminate the -er comparative formative and to replace it with the more analytic more.
In linguistics, focus (abbreviated FOC) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom Mary insulted.