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tā He 打 dǎ hit 人。 rén person 他 打 人。 tā dǎ rén He hit person He hits someone. Chinese can also be considered a topic-prominent language: there is a strong preference for sentences that begin with the topic, usually "given" or "old" information; and end with the comment, or "new" information. Certain modifications of the basic subject–verb–object order are permissible and ...
Mandarin active voice sentences have the same verb phrase structure as English active voice sentences. There is a common active construction in Mandarin called Ba(把) construction: “Ba” is a verb, not a preposition. It is a three-place predicate that subcategorizes for a subject, an object, and a VP complement. [16]
Within a verb phrase, adverbs usually appear before a verb. The language, as analyzed in this article, uses coverbs (in a serial verb construction ) and postpositions . Classical Chinese makes heavy use of parataxis where English would use a dependent clause ; [ 6 ] however, there are means to form dependent clauses, some of which appear before ...
In Latin, the sequence of tenses rule affects dependent verbs in the subjunctive mood, mainly in indirect questions, indirect commands, and purpose clauses. [4] If the main verb is in one of the non-past tenses, the subordinate verb is usually in the present or perfect subjunctive (primary sequence); if the main verb is in one of the past tenses, the subordinate verb is usually in the ...
For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as a "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, savoir and saber. This is also true when the sense of verb "to know" is "to know somebody", in this case opposed in aspect to the ...
Research in linguistics regards such sentences as instances of the sequence of tense phenomenon. There is, in fact, a meaning contrast between the following two sentences. This meaning contrast is lost when so-called "tense confusions" are prescribed against.
'The Schmied smith hämmert hammers das the Metall metal flach. flat.' Der Schmied hämmert das Metall flach. 'The smith hammers the metal flat.' Verbal resultatives This sort of resultative is a grammatical aspect construction that indicates the result state of the event denoted by the verb. English does not have a productive resultative construction. It is widely accepted that the be ...
Older speakers of Shanghainese tend to place adverbs after the verb, but younger people, again under heavy influence from Mandarin, favor pre-verbal placement of adverbs. [ 74 ] The third person singular pronoun 伊 ( yi ) (he/she/it) or the derived phrase 伊講 ( yi kaon ) ("he says") can appear at the end of a sentence.