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Subject + Verb (transitive) + Indirect Object + Direct Object Example: She made me a pie. This clause pattern is a derivative of S+V+O, transforming the object of a preposition into an indirect object of the verb, as the example sentence in transformational grammar is actually "She made a pie for me".
Verbosity, or verboseness, is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary. [1] The opposite of verbosity is succinctness. [dubious – discuss] Some teachers, including the author of The Elements of Style, warn against verbosity. Similarly Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, among others, famously avoided it.
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
[a] The predicate must contain a verb, and the verb requires or permits other elements to complete the predicate, or else precludes them from doing so. These elements are objects (direct, indirect, prepositional), predicatives, and adjuncts: She dances. — Verb-only predicate. Ben reads the book. — Verb-plus-direct-object predicate.
In some languages, like Welsh, verbs have special inflections to be used in negative clauses. (In some language families, this may lead to reference to a negative mood.) An example is Japanese, which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the suffix -nai (indicating negation), e.g. taberu ("eat") and tabenai ("do not eat").
Subject–auxiliary inversion (SAI; also called subject–operator inversion) is a frequently occurring type of inversion in the English language whereby a finite auxiliary verb – taken here to include finite forms of the copula be – appears to "invert" (change places) with the subject. [1]
Verbs or verb phrases combined as in he washed, peeled, and diced the turnips (verbs conjoined, object shared); he washed the turnips, peeled them, and diced them (full verb phrases, including objects, conjoined). Other equivalent items linked, such as prefixes linked in pre- and post-test counselling, [34] numerals as in two or three buildings ...
Since the finite verb is viewed as the head of the clause in each case, these data allow an analysis in terms of shifting. The subject and modal adverb have swapped positions. In other languages that have many head-final structures, shifting in the pre-head domain is a common occurrence.