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In contrast, formal English requires an overt subject in each clause. A sentence may not need a subject to have valid meaning, but to satisfy the syntactic requirement for an explicit subject a pleonastic (or dummy pronoun) is used; only the first sentence in the following pair is acceptable English: "It's raining." "Is raining."
The earliest recorded usage in English of sesquipedalian is in 1656, and of sesquipedalianism, 1863. [5] Garrulous comes from Latin garrulus, "talkative", a form of the verb garrīre, "to chatter". The adjective may describe a person who is excessively talkative, especially about trivial matters, or a speech that is excessively wordy or diffuse [6]
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 ...
Elocutio – the stage of elaborating the wording of a text, using correct grammar and diction. Enallage – the switching of grammatical forms for an expressive purpose. Enthymeme – a type of argument that is grounded in assumed commonalities between a rhetor and the audience. (For example: Claim 1: Bob is a person. Therefore, Claim 3: Bob ...
It is a meaning relation in which a phrase "stands in" for (expresses the same content as) another where the meaning is recoverable from the context. [4] In English, pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns. [5]: 239 Pronouns can be pro-forms for non-noun phrases.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
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For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or the foot of a pot. When an ambiguity instead results from two separate words which happen to be pronounced the same way, it is called homonymy. For instance, the English word "row" can ...