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A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
When the affirmative already uses auxiliary verbs (I am going), no other auxiliary verbs are added to negate the clause (I am not going). (Until the period of early Modern English, negation was effected without additional auxiliary verbs: I go not.) Most combinations of auxiliary verbs etc. with not have contracted forms: don't, can't, isn't, etc.
At that point, in order to make sense of the sentence, the reader is forced to reparse it, with "fruit flies" as the subject and "like" as the main verb. The first sentence predisposes the reader towards the incorrect parsing of the second. After reparsing the second, it becomes clear that the first sentence could be re-parsed in the same way.
Reed–Kellogg diagram of the sentence. The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are: a. a city named Buffalo. This is used as a noun adjunct in the sentence; n. the noun buffalo, an animal, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid ...
One of the first writers to have attempted to provide the sentence meaning through context is Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1997). [9] Chao's poem, entitled Making Sense Out of Nonsense: The Story of My Friend Whose "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (after Noam Chomsky) was published in 1971. This poem attempts to explain what ...
The sentence appears on a computer monitor word-by-word. After each word, participants were asked to choose if the sentence is still grammatical so far. Then they would go on to rate the sentence from 1 "perfectly good English" to 7 "really bad English." The result showed that ungrammatical sentences were rated to be better than the grammatical ...
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Sentences can also be extended by recursively embedding clauses one into another, such as [2] [3] "The mouse ran away." "The mouse that the cat hit ran away."... This also highlights the difference between linguistic performance and linguistic competence, because the language can support more variation than can reasonably be created or recorded ...