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For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar , it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate .
An incomplete sentence, or sentence fragment, is a set of words that does not form a complete sentence, either because it does not express a complete thought or because it lacks some grammatical element, such as a subject or a verb. [6] [7] A dependent clause without an independent clause is an example of an incomplete sentence.
For example, newspapers, scientific journals, and fictional essays have somewhat different conventions for the placement of paragraph breaks. A common English usage misconception is that a paragraph has three to five sentences; single-word paragraphs can be seen in some professional writing, and journalists often use single-sentence paragraphs. [7]
Examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic. [ 2 ] Frederick Crews uses the term to mean a type of essay and categorizes essays as falling into four types, corresponding to four basic functions of prose: narration , or telling; description , or picturing; exposition , or explaining; and argument , or ...
For example, changing a complex sentence into two simpler sentences while maintaining the overall meaning falls into this category. Discourse-based changes are alterations that affect the larger discourse or text structure, such as reordering points in a paragraph or changing the way arguments are presented without altering the factual content.
There's no rule against it. A paragraph can be a single sentence, whether long, short, or middling. [30] According to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Writing Center's website, "Many students define paragraphs in terms of length: a paragraph is a group of at least five sentences, a paragraph is half a page long, etc." The ...