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For example, a grammar for a context-free language is left-recursive if there exists a non-terminal symbol A that can be put through the production rules to produce a string with A as the leftmost symbol. [15] An example of recursive grammar is a clause within a sentence separated by two commas. [16]
The subject is the agent Marge in the first sentence and the patient The coffee table in the second sentence. The direct object is the patient the coffee table in the first sentence, and there is no direct object in the second sentence. The situation is similar with the ergative verb sunk/sink in the second pair of
Syntax refers to the linguistic structure above the word level (for example, how sentences are formed) – though without taking into account intonation, which is the domain of phonology. Morphology, by contrast, refers to the structure at and below the word level (for example, how compound words are formed), but above the level of individual ...
In mathematical logic, a formal theory is a set of sentences expressed in a formal language. A formal system (also called a logical calculus, or a logical system) consists of a formal language together with a deductive apparatus (also called a deductive system).
Noun phrases are phrases that function grammatically as nouns within sentences, for example as the subject or object of a verb. Most noun phrases have a noun as their head. [5] An English noun phrase typically takes the following form (not all elements need be present):
The fundamental question of formal semantics is what you know when you know how to interpret expressions of a language. A common assumption is that knowing the meaning of a sentence requires knowing its truth conditions, or in other words knowing what the world would have to be like for the sentence to be true. For instance, to know the meaning ...
An incomplete sentence, or sentence fragment, is a set of words that does not form a complete sentence, either because it does not express a complete thought or because it lacks some grammatical element, such as a subject or a verb. [6] [7] A dependent clause without an independent clause is an example of an incomplete sentence.
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."