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Allusion is an economical device, a figure of speech that uses a relatively short space to draw upon the ready stock of ideas, cultural memes or emotion already associated with a topic. Thus, an allusion is understandable only to those with prior knowledge of the covert reference in question, a mark of their cultural literacy. [8]
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar , it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate .
Various sentences using the syllables mā, má, mǎ, mà, and ma are often used to illustrate the importance of tones to foreign learners. One example: Chinese: 妈妈骑马马慢妈妈骂马; pinyin: māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, māma mà mǎ; lit. 'Mother is riding a horse... the horse is slow... mother scolds the horse'. [37]
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
An allusion is understandable only to those with prior knowledge of the reference in question (which the writer assumes to be so). Allusions are structurally related to idioms. Note: An illusion is a different part of speech that should not be confused with an allusion. Examples: Utopian discord; A Pearl Harbor sneak-attack
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
The phrase English as she is spoke is nowadays used allusively, in a form of linguistic play, as a stereotypical example of bad English grammar. [14] In January 1864, then US President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward laughed as Lincoln's private secretary John Hay read aloud from the book. [15]
An idiom dictionary may be a traditional book or expressed in another medium such as a database within software for machine translation.Examples of the genre include Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which explains traditional allusions and proverbs, and Fowler's Modern English Usage, which was conceived as an idiom dictionary following the completion of the Concise Oxford English ...