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The term antonym (and the related antonymy) is commonly taken to be synonymous with opposite, but antonym also has other more restricted meanings. Graded (or gradable) antonyms are word pairs whose meanings are opposite and which lie on a continuous spectrum (hot, cold).
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").
Mandarin active voice sentences have the same verb phrase structure as English active voice sentences. There is a common active construction in Mandarin called Ba(把) construction: “Ba” is a verb, not a preposition. It is a three-place predicate that subcategorizes for a subject, an object, and a VP complement. [16]
Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure.
In an active voice sentence like Sam ate the apples, the grammatical subject, Sam, is the agent and is acting on the patient, the apples, which are the object of the verb, ate. In the passive voice, The apples were eaten by Sam , the order is reversed and so that patient is followed by the verb and then the agent.
The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective–noun combination of two words, but they can also be devised in the meaning of sentences or phrases. One classic example of the use of oxymorons in English literature can be found in this example from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo strings together thirteen in a row: [11]
Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep. [22]
In Hawaiian, for example, aloha is translated both as "hello" and as "goodbye", but the essential meaning of the word is "love", whether used as a greeting or farewell. Similarly, 안녕 ( annyeong ) in Korean can mean both "hello" and "goodbye" but the central meaning is "peace".