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The use of a MacGuffin as a plot device predates the name MacGuffin. The Holy Grail of Arthurian legend has been cited as an early example of a MacGuffin. The Holy Grail is the desired object that is essential to initiate and advance the plot, but the final disposition of the Grail is never revealed, suggesting that the object is not of significance in itself. [8]
A clause is often said to be the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. [1] But this semantic idea of a clause leaves out much of English clause syntax. For example, clauses can be questions, [2]: 161 but questions are not propositions. [3] A syntactic description of an English clause is that it is a subject and a ...
The adverbial clause describes when and where the action of the main clause, I had only two things on my mind, took place. A relative clause is a dependent clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase in the independent clause. In other words, the relative clause functions similar to an adjective. Let him who has been deceived complain.
English clause elements are the minimum set of units needed to describe the linear structure of a clause. Traditionally, they are partly identified by terms such as subject and object . Their distribution in a clause is partly indicated by traditional terms defining verbs as transitive or intransitive .
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
A noun such as Fred or a noun phrase such as the book cannot qualify as subject and direct object, respectively, unless they appear in an environment, e.g. a clause, where they are related to each other and/or to an action or state. In this regard, the main verb in a clause is responsible for assigning grammatical relations to the clause ...
The complementizer is often held to be the syntactic head of a full clause, which is therefore often represented by the abbreviation CP (for complementizer phrase).Evidence of the complementizer functioning as the head of its clause includes that it is commonly the last element in a clause in head-final languages like Korean or Japanese in which other heads follow their complements, but it ...
In linguistics, an absolute construction is a grammatical construction standing apart from a normal or usual syntactical relation with other words or sentence elements. It can be a non-finite clause that is subordinate in form and modifies an entire sentence, an adjective or possessive pronoun standing alone without a modified substantive, or a transitive verb when its object is implied but ...