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Demonstrations of sentences where the semantic interpretation is bound to context or knowledge of the world. The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam: ambiguous use of a pronoun: The word "it" refers to the table being made of Styrofoam; but "it" would immediately refer to the large ball if we replaced ...
An exclamative is a sentence type in English that typically 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!.
The ability to ask questions is often assessed in relation to comprehension of syntactic structures. It is widely accepted that the first questions are asked by humans during their early infancy, at the pre-syntactic, one word stage of language development , with the use of question intonation .
Generally, context and auxiliary words like "already", "at present", etc. sometimes are enough to inform us that the condition has present meaning, but sometimes are not, which leads to ambiguity, for example: If you do it now, you will not have to do it later. The word "now" can be interpreted as "at present" or "in the immediate future".
Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of single utterances (sentences) without context.
Verbal context influences the way an expression is understood; hence the norm of not citing people out of context. Since much contemporary linguistics takes texts, discourses, or conversations as the object of analysis, the modern study of verbal context takes place in terms of the analysis of discourse structures and their mutual relationships ...
A particle may be placed at the beginning or end of the sentence, or attached to an element within the sentence. Examples of interrogative particles typically placed at the start of the sentence include the French est-ce que and Polish czy. (The English word whether behaves in this way too, but is used in indirect questions only.)
If, for example, one were to ask whether you were going to New York or London, or if your favourite colour were red or blue, or if you had given up a particular bad habit, he would be guilty of the fallacy of the complex question, if, in each case, the alternatives, as a matter of fact, were more numerous than, or were in any way different from ...