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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]
The influence of context parameters on language use or discourse is usually studied in terms of language variation, style or register (see Stylistics). The basic assumption here is that language users adapt the properties of their language use (such as intonation, lexical choice, syntax, and other aspects of formulation ) to the current ...
Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with texts as communication systems.Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars.The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed in much broader terms that go beyond a mere extension of traditional grammar towards an entire text.
Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep. [22]
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
Compounds are units of meaning formed with two or more words. The words are usually written separately, but some may be hyphenated or be written as one word. Often the meaning of the compound can be guessed by knowing the meaning of the individual words. It is not always simple to detach collocations and compounds. car park; post office; narrow ...
Lexical semantics also explores whether the meaning of a lexical unit is established by looking at its neighbourhood in the semantic network, [7] (words it occurs with in natural sentences), or whether the meaning is already locally contained in the lexical unit. In English, WordNet is an example of a semantic network.
Context-free grammars arise in linguistics where they are used to describe the structure of sentences and words in a natural language, and they were invented by the linguist Noam Chomsky for this purpose. By contrast, in computer science, as the use of recursively-defined concepts increased, they were used more and more.