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In linguistics, focus (abbreviated FOC) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom Mary insulted.
In English clauses with a verb in the passive voice, for instance, the topic is typically the subject, while the agent may be omitted or may follow the preposition by. For example, in the sentence "The little girl was bitten by the dog", "the little girl" is the subject and the topic, but "the dog" is the agent.
In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as follows: it + conjugated form of to be + X + subordinate clause. where it is a cleft pronoun and X is usually a noun phrase (although it can also be a prepositional phrase, and in some cases an adjectival or adverbial phrase). The focus is on X, or else on the subordinate clause or some element ...
Cross-linguistically, word order variation (the so-called "inverted sentences") is one of the main syntactic devices used to convey specific information structure configurations, namely the presentational focus. [7] English in fact uses more than intonation for expressing information structure, so that clefts are used for exhaustive focus, and ...
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts. Overview
But in generative grammar, which sees meaning as separate from grammar, they are categories that define the distribution of syntactic elements. [1] For structuralists such as Roman Jakobson grammatical categories were lexemes that were based on binary oppositions of "a single feature of meaning that is equally present in all contexts of use".
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The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]
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