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In the traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit consisting of a verb followed by a particle (e.g., turn down, run into, or sit up), sometimes collocated with a preposition (e.g., get together with, run out of, or feed off of). Phrasal verbs ordinarily cannot be understood based upon the ...
Corpus linguists specify a key word in context and identify the words immediately surrounding them, to illustrate the way words are used in practice. The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the measure of association , which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or ...
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
Coming from the Spanish word "juzgado" which means court of justice, hoosegow was a term used around the turn of the last century to describe a place where drunks in the old west spent a lot of ...
An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense.Categorized as formulaic language, an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. [1]
A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from straightforward language use or literal meaning to produce a rhetorical or intensified effect (emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, etc.). [1] [2] In the distinction between literal and figurative language, figures of speech constitute the latter.
In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than, or otherwise not predictable from, the sum of their meanings when used independently.
In grammar, a phrase—called expression in some contexts—is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence.