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Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side so one element identifies the other in a different way.The two elements are said to be in apposition, and one of the elements is called the appositive, but its identification requires consideration of how the elements are used in a sentence.
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
For example: monsters unseen were said to lurk beyond the moor (postpositive attribute in subject of clause), but the children trembled in fear of monsters unseen (postpositive attribute in predicate of clause) and the monsters, if they existed, remained unseen (predicate adjective in postpositive position).
The appositives in example four are non-restrictive, since Bill's friend and the famous singer have already been identified." The famous singer has not been previously identified, so the appositive "Dean Martin" is still restrictive. —Unsigned
Such examples are behind Noam Chomsky's comment that, "Languages are not 'designed for parsability' … we may say that languages, as such, are not usable." [ citation needed ] Some researchers (such as Peter Reich ) came up with theories that though single center embedding is acceptable (as in "the man that boy kicked is a friend of mine ...
The following examples are from Japanese, where the case markers perform a role similar to that of adpositions: a. ..mise ni store to = 'to the store' b. ..ie kara house from = 'from the house' c. ..hashi de chopsticks with = 'with chopsticks' And from Finnish, where the case endings perform a role similar to that of adpositions: a. ..kauppaan
An important aspect of phrase structure rules is that they view sentence structure from the top down. The category on the left of the arrow is a greater constituent and the immediate constituents to the right of the arrow are lesser constituents.
Young (1995) [4] gives some examples of what a T-unit is and is not: "The following elements were counted as one T-unit: a single clause, a matrix plus subordinate clause, two or more phrases in apposition, and fragments of clauses produced by ellipsis. Co-ordinate clauses were counted as two t-units.