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German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. German is an OV (Object-Verb) language. [1] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, uses V2 word order, though only in independent clauses. In dependent clauses, the finite verb is placed last.
In other West Germanic languages like German and Dutch, the word order after a subordinating conjunction is different from that in an independent clause, e.g. in Dutch want ('for') is coordinating, but omdat ('because') is subordinating. The clause after the coordinating conjunction has normal word order, but the clause after the subordinating ...
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Function words might be prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, grammatical articles or particles, all of which belong to the group of closed-class words. Interjections are sometimes considered function words but they belong to the group of open-class words. Function words might or might not be inflected or might have affixes.
Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner. Other terms than part of speech —particularly in modern linguistic classifications, which often make more precise distinctions than the traditional scheme does—include word class ...
The beginnings of German dictionaries date back to a series of glossaries from the 8th century CE. The first comprehensive German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB), was begun by the Brothers Grimm in 1838. The Duden dictionary, begun in 1880 and now in its 25th edition, is currently the prescriptive source for the spelling of Standard ...
Unlike English, the German language distinguishes adverbs which qualify verbs or adjectives from those which qualify whole sentences. For the latter case, many German adjectives form a special adverb form ending in -erweise, e.g. glücklicherweise "luckily", traurigerweise "sadly" (from Weise = way, manner).