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The phrase "lend me your ear" is interpreted to metaphorically mean that the speaker wants the listener to grant the speaker temporary control over what the listener hears. First, analyze the verb phrase "lend me your ear" metaphorically to mean "turn your ear in my direction", since it is known that, literally lending a body part is ...
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").
Climax – an arrangement of phrases or topics in increasing order, as with good, better, best. Colon – a rhetorical figure consisting of a clause that is grammatically, but not logically, complete. Colloquialism – a word or phrase that is not formal or literary, typically one used in ordinary or familiar conversation.
The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituents. In the example sentences below, the subjects are indicated in boldface.
Saussure argued that the meaning of a sign "depends on its relation to other words within the system;" for example, to understand an individual word such as "tree," one must also understand the word "bush" and how the two relate to each other. [7] It is this difference from other signs that allows the possibility of a speech community.
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]
For example, in the sentence "The little girl was bitten by the dog", "the little girl" is the subject and the topic, but "the dog" is the agent. In some languages, word order and other syntactic phenomena are determined largely by the topic–comment (theme–rheme) structure. These languages are sometimes referred to as topic-prominent ...
The subject is defined as the verb argument that appears outside the canonical finite verb phrase, whereas the object is taken to be the verb argument that appears inside the verb phrase. [3] This approach takes the configuration as primitive, whereby the grammatical relations are then derived from the configuration.