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An echo question is a question that seeks to confirm or clarify another speaker's utterance (the stimulus), by repeating it back in some form. For example: A: I'm moving to Greenland. B: You're moving where? In English, echo questions have a distinctive prosody, featuring a rising intonation. A speaker may use an echo question to seek ...
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
If the verb is in the present perfect, for example, the tag question uses has or have; if the verb is in a present progressive form, the tag is formed with am, are, is; if the verb is in a tense which does not normally use an auxiliary, like the present simple, the auxiliary is taken from the emphatic do form; and if the sentence has a modal ...
Indirect questions do not necessarily follow the same rules of grammar as direct questions. [11] For example, in English and some other languages, indirect questions are formed without inversion of subject and verb (compare the word order in "where are they?" and "(I wonder) where they are").
Example: Abdul is happy. Jeanne is a person. I am she. Subject + Verb (transitive) + Indirect Object + Direct Object Example: She made me a pie. This clause pattern is a derivative of S+V+O, transforming the object of a preposition into an indirect object of the verb, as the example sentence in transformational grammar is actually "She made a ...
However, in terms of word order, the interrogative word (or the phrase it is part of) is brought to the start of the sentence (an example of wh-fronting) in many languages. Such questions may also be subject to subject–verb inversion, as with yes–no questions. Some examples for English follow: You are (somewhere). (declarative word order)
The declarative sentence is the most common kind of sentence, and can be considered the default form: when a language forms a question or a command, it will be a modification of the declarative. A declarative states an idea (either objectively or subjectively on the part of the speaker; and may be either true or false) for the purpose of ...
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...