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In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1] English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast , or future and nonfuture . There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages , though they can possess a future and nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. [ 3 ]
Another example can be found from Ket: [7] fèmba.di, “I am a Tungus” dɨ.fen, “I am standing” In Turkic, and a few Uralic and Australian Aboriginal languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different. For example, in Turkish:
It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to; inflectional endings and derivational suffixes are unique and specific to. On the other hand, most words belong to more than one word class. For example, run can serve as either a verb or a noun (these are regarded as two different lexemes). [3]
One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms of English, between sentences such as "Have you eaten?" and "Did you eat?". In European languages, rather than locating an event time, the way tense does, aspect describes "the internal temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of conceiving the flow of the ...
A typical English verb may have five different inflected forms: The base form or plain form (go, write, climb), which has several uses—as an infinitive, imperative, present subjunctive, and present indicative except in the third-person singular; The -s form (goes, writes, climbs), used as the present indicative in the third-person singular
A regular English verb has only one principal part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived.This is the base form or dictionary form.For example, from the base form exist, all the inflected forms of the verb (exist, exists, existed, existing) can be predictably derived.
For example, the stem -ntu of the noun umúntu has the pattern L (a single low-toned syllable) while the stem -fúbá of the noun ísifûba has an underlying HH pattern (two high-toned syllables). There are several rules which act to modify the underlying tones to produce the final tone pattern that is actually used in speech.