Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
[2] The syntactic role characteristically performed by determiners is known as the determinative function (see § Terminology). [3] A determinative combines with a noun (or, more formally, a nominal; see English nouns § Internal structure) to form a noun phrase (NP).
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
A count noun can take a number as its determiner (e.g., -20 degrees, zero calories, one cat, two bananas, 276 dollars). These nouns tend to designate individually identifiable entities, whereas a non-count noun designates a continuum or an undifferentiated mass (air, cheese, lots of gravel some water, enough heat).
Abstract nouns: deceit, information, cunning, and nouns derived from adjectives, such as honesty, wisdom, intelligence, poverty, stupidity, curiosity, and words ending with "-ness", such as goodness, freshness, laziness, and nouns which are homonyms of adjectives with a similar meaning, such as good, bad (can also use goodness and badness), hot ...
A productive pattern or affix is one that is commonly used to produce novel forms. For example, the negating prefix un- is more productive in English than the alternative in- ; both of them occur in established words (such as unusual and inaccessible ), but faced with a new word which does not have an established negation, a native speaker is ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
a: nouns that end in e formed from an -ar verb are often written with the -a ending if one wishes to emphasize the verbal (active) aspect. A me veni un pensa (a thought occurs to me) vs. Penses e paroles (thoughts and words). The a ending also makes nouns feminine: anglese (English person), angleso (Englishman), anglesa (English woman). This ...