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Skilled users of the language can produce effects such as humor by varying the normal patterns of collocation. This approach is popular with poets , journalists and advertisers . Collocations may seem natural to native writers and speakers, but are not obvious to non-native speakers.
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
Collocations can be in a syntactic relation (such as verb–object: make and decision), lexical relation (such as antonymy), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as awkward if collocational preferences are ...
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.
There are two forms: repetition and collocation. Repetition uses the same word, or synonyms, antonyms, etc. For example, "Which dress are you going to wear?" – "I will wear my green frock," uses the synonyms "dress" and "frock" for lexical cohesion. Collocation uses related words that typically go together or tend to repeat the same meaning.
For example the adjective "dry" only means "not sweet" in combination with the noun "wine". Such phrases are often considered idiomatic. Another example is the word "white", which has specific meanings when used with "wine", "coffee," "noise," "chess piece," or "person."
Because standard English does not have negative concord but many varieties and registers of English do, and because most English speakers can speak or comprehend across varieties and registers, double negatives as collocations are functionally auto-antonymic (contranymic) in English; for example, a collocation such as "ain't nothin" or "not ...
When we speak of English as a foreign language (EFL), we are referring to the role of English for learners in a country where English is not spoken by the majority (what Braj Kachru calls the expanding circle). English as a second language (ESL) refers to the role of English for learners in an English-speaking country, i.e. usually immigrants ...