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In linguistics, focus (abbreviated FOC) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person whom Mary insulted.
Topic being what is being talked about and the subject being what is doing the action can, also, be distinct concepts from the concept agent (or actor)—the "doer", which is defined by semantics, that is, by the contextual meaning of the sentence in the paragraph. In English clauses with a verb in the passive voice, for instance, the topic is ...
In English, all-cleft sentences are related to pseudo-clefts in which they are constructed with the subject of the sentence embedded in the phrase and expressed with the verb "to be". [8] Where pseudo-clefts begin with a wh-phrase ( what , where , who ), all-clefts begin with the use of the word "all".
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
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 .
The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb. For "Kate ate a piece of cake", the possibilities are: "Kati megevett egy szelet tortát." (same word order as English) ["Kate ate a piece of cake."] "Egy szelet tortát Kati evett meg."
If the sentence has an auxiliary verb, the subject is placed after the auxiliary and the main verb. For example: a. A unicorn will come into the room. b. Into the room will come a unicorn. Since this type of inversion generally places the focus on the subject, the subject is likely to be a full noun or noun phrase rather than a pronoun.
The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]