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Sentence (linguistics) In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example " The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ." In traditional grammar, it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate.
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: " Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher. ", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [ 39][circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous.
Typology of clauses. In standard English, sentences are composed of five clause patterns: [citation needed] Subject + Verb (intransitive) Example: She runs. Subject + Verb (transitive) + Object. Example: She runs the meeting. Subject + Verb (linking) + Subject Complement (adjective, noun, pronoun)
Topic sentence. In expository writing, a topic sentence is a sentence that summarizes the main idea of a paragraph. [1] [2] It is usually the first sentence in a paragraph. Also known as a focus sentence, it encapsulates or organizes an entire paragraph. Although topic sentences may appear anywhere in a paragraph, in academic essays they often ...
A formal grammar describes which strings from an alphabet of a formal language are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. A formal grammar is defined as a set of production rules for such strings in a formal language.
The diagram of a simple sentence begins with a horizontal line called the base. The subjectis written on the left, the predicateon the right, separated by a vertical bar that extends through the base. The predicate must contain a verb, and the verb either requires other sentence elements to complete the predicate, permits them to do so, or ...
Periodic sentence. A periodic sentence is a sentence with a stylistic device featuring syntactical subordination to a single main idea, which usually is not complete until the very end of the sentence. [1] The periodic sentence emphasizes its main idea by placing it at the end, following all the subordinate clauses and other modifiers that ...
The five basic sentence forms (or "structures") in English are the declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative and the optative. These correspond to the discourse functions statement, question, exclamation, and command respectively. The different forms involve different combinations in word order, the addition of certain auxiliaries or ...