Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
For example, the noun aerobics has given rise to the adjective aerobicized. [3] Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. [3] For example, my very good friend Peter is a phrase that can be used in a sentence as if it were a noun, and is therefore called a noun phrase.
A generative parse tree: the sentence is divided into a noun phrase (subject), and a verb phrase which includes the object. This is in contrast to structural and functional grammar which consider the subject and object as equal constituents. [9] [10]
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
References on English usage strongly criticize the phrase as "ugly" [2] and "Janus-faced". [4] William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, in their classic The Elements of Style–recognized by Time one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books written in English since 1923, [6] say and/or is "A device, or shortcut, that damages a sentence and often leads to confusion or ambiguity". [3]
For example, after is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariant (non-inflecting) grammatical particle that stands between conjuncts. A conjunction may be placed at the beginning of a sentence, [1] but some superstition about the practice persists. [2]
They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories (parts of speech) and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar .
Many modern linguists, including Sprouse, [9] support this idea. Acceptability judgments, on the other hand, fall in a continuous spectrum. [9] [7] Sentences may either be clearly acceptable or clearly unacceptable, but there are also sentences that are partially acceptable. Hence, according to Sprouse, the difference between grammaticality and ...
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().