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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 ...
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).
Some grammatical case markings have a similar function to adpositions; a case affix in one language may be equivalent in meaning to a preposition or postposition in another. For example, in English, the agent of a passive construction is marked by the preposition by, while in Russian it is marked by the use of the instrumental case.
The word grammar is derived from Greek γραμματικὴ τέχνη (grammatikḕ téchnē), which means "art of letters", from γράμμα (grámma), "letter", itself from γράφειν (gráphein), "to draw, to write". [3] The same Greek root also appears in the words graphics, grapheme, and photograph.
DICTIONARY of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE: in which The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS, and ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNIFICATIONS by EXAMPLES from the best WRITERS. To which are prefixed, A HISTORY of the LANGUAGE, and AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR. By SAMUEL JOHNSON, A.M. In TWO Volumes VOL. I
Spite can be broadly defined to include any vindictive or mean-spirited actions. Alternatively, a narrower definition includes the requirement that spiteful acts involve some degree of self-harm ." [ 1 ] One possible definition of spite is to intentionally annoy , hurt , or upset even when there might be no (apparent) gain, and even when those ...
Meillet's definition was "the attribution of a grammatical nature to a formerly autonomous word". [5] Meillet showed that what was at issue was not the origins of grammatical forms but their transformations. He was thus able to present a notion of the creation of grammatical forms as a legitimate study for linguistics.
A run-on sentence is a sentence that consists of two or more independent clauses (i.e. clauses that have not been made dependent through the use of a relative pronoun or a subordinating conjunction) that are joined without appropriate punctuation, the clauses "run on" into confusion, the independent clauses can be "fused", as in "It is nearly ...