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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 ...
Prepositions are typically small, common words that show the relationship between a noun or pronoun and another element in a clause. These terms can indicate the direction, time, location or ...
English word order has moved from the Germanic verb-second (V2) word order to being almost exclusively subject–verb–object (SVO). The combination of SVO order and use of auxiliary verbs often creates clusters of two or more verbs at the center of the sentence, such as he had hoped to try to open it. In most sentences, English marks ...
These examples illustrate that pied-piping is often necessary when the wh-word is inside a noun phrase or adjective phrase. Pied-piping is motivated in part by the barriers and islands to extraction (see below). When the wh-word appears underneath a blocking category or in an island, the entire encompassing phrase must be fronted.
Particle verbs (phrasal verbs in the strict sense) are two-word verbs composed of a simple verb and a particle extension that modifies its meaning. The particle is thus integrally collocated with the verb. In older grammars, the particle was usually analyzed as an adverb. [8] [9] a. Kids grow up so fast these days b. You shouldn't give in so ...
An exclamative is a sentence type in English that typically spontaneously expresses a feeling or emotion, but does not use one of the other structures. It often has the form as in the examples below of [WH + Complement + Subject + Verb], but can be minor sentences (i.e. without a verb) such as [WH + Complement] How wonderful!. In other words ...
There are sentences in English in which a full verb is later 'picked up' by an auxiliary. The position is very similar to that of a noun being 'picked up' by a pronoun. [. . .] If the initial sentence, which contains the main verb, is not heard, all the remainder is unintelligible; it is, in fact, truly in code. The following example is from Firth:
Wh-movement—which involves wh-words like who, what, when, where, why and how—is a syntactic dependency between a sentence-initial wh-word and the gap that it is associated with. Wh- movement can lead to P-stranding if the object of the preposition is moved to sentence-initial position, and the preposition is left behind.