Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
yesterday wurde was nur only geschlafen. slept Gestern wurde nur geschlafen. yesterday was only slept 'Everybody slept yesterday.' The word gestern 'yesterday' is generally construed as an adverb, which means it cannot be taken as the subject in this sentence. Certain verbs in German also require a dative or accusative object instead of a nominative subject, e.g. Mir me- DAT graut is uneasy ...
The subject of a sentence is often defined as a noun phrase that denotes the semantic agent or "the doer of the action". [6] [p. 69]a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that usually comes before a main verb and represents the person or thing that performs the action of the verb, or about which something is stated.
The subject precedes the verb by default, but if another word or phrase is put at the front of the clause, the subject is moved to the position immediately after the verb. For example, the German sentence Ich esse oft Rinderbraten (I often eat roast beef) is in the standard SVO word order, with the adverb oft (often) immediately after the verb.
The clause structure with an inverted subject and verb, used to form questions as described above, is also used in certain types of declarative sentences. This occurs mainly when the sentence begins with adverbial or other phrases that are essentially negative or contain words such as only , hardly , etc.:
A few English verbs have no special forms that indicate subject agreement (I may, you may, he may), and the verb to be has an additional form am that can only be used with the pronoun I as the subject. Verbs in written French exhibit more intensive agreement morphology than English verbs: je suis (I am), tu es ("you are", singular informal ...
The "future tense" of perfective verbs is formed in the same way as the present tense of imperfective verbs. However, in South Slavic languages , there may be a greater variety of forms – Bulgarian , for example, has present, past (both "imperfect" and "aorist") and "future tenses", for both perfective and imperfective verbs, as well as ...
The active voice is the most commonly used in many languages and represents the "normal" case, in which the subject of the verb is the agent. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action or causes the happening denoted by the verb. Sentence (1) is in active voice, as indicated by the verb form saw.
Many sentences in English and other Indo-European languages have the agent as subject. The use of some transitive verbs denoting strictly reciprocal events may involve a conflation of agent and subject. In the sentence "John met Sylvia", for example, though both John and Sylvia would equally meet Dowty's definition of a Proto-Agent, the co ...