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In linguistics, focus (abbreviated FOC) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom Mary insulted.
In English it is also possible to use other sentence structures to show the topic of the sentence, as in the following: As for the little girl, the dog bit her. It was the little girl that the dog bit. The case of expletives is sometimes rather complex. Consider sentences with expletives (meaningless subjects), like: It is raining.
A cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus. In spoken language, this focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation. In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as ...
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar , it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate .
By contrast, generative theories generally provide performance-based explanations for the oddness of center embedding sentences like one in (2). According to such explanations, the grammar of English could in principle generate such sentences, but doing so in practice is so taxing on working memory that the sentence ends up being unparsable ...
The topic (or theme) of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (or rheme, or sometimes focus) is what is being said about the topic. That the information structure of a clause is divided in this way is generally agreed on, but the boundary between topic/theme depends on grammatical theory.
In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of a verb and its arguments except the subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause.Thus, in the sentence A fat man quickly put the money into the box, the words quickly put the money into the box constitute a verb phrase; it consists of the verb put and its arguments, but not the subject a fat man.
In a sentence like mutila gizonak ikusi du, you know who is seeing whom because -k is added to the one doing the seeing. So the sentence means "the man saw the boy". If you want to say "the boy saw the man", add the -k instead to the word meaning "the boy": mutilak gizona ikusi du.