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A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
A sentence may also be broken down by functional parts: subject, object, adverbial, verb (predicator). [6] The subject is the owner of an action, the verb represents the action, the object represents the recipient of the action, and the adverbial qualifies the action. The various parts can be phrases rather than individual words.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
English parts of speech are based on Latin and Greek parts of speech. [40] Some English grammar rules were adopted from Latin , for example John Dryden is thought to have created the rule no sentences can end in a preposition because Latin cannot end sentences in prepositions.
This sentence was constructed by Noam Chomsky as an illustration that phrase structure rules are capable of generating syntactically correct but semantically incorrect sentences. Phrase structure rules break sentences down into their constituent parts. These constituents are often represented as tree structures (dendrograms). The tree for ...
A generative parse tree: the sentence is divided into a noun phrase (subject), and a verb phrase which includes the object. This is in contrast to structural and functional grammar which consider the subject and object as equal constituents. [9] [10]
Intrusion probes sentence structure by having an adverb "intrude" into parts of the sentence. The idea is that the strings on either side of the adverb are constituents. [18] Drunks could put off the customers. (a) Drunks definitely could put off the customers. (b) Drunks could definitely put off the customers.
A sentence, in turn, is formed as a sequence of symbols, beginning with a designated non-terminal symbol and culminating in a terminal string. Every terminal node is part of a constituent, as constituents form the interconnected structure leading from the root to the smallest, indivisible unit of the tree.