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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.
A cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus .
In English it is also possible to use other sentence structures to show the topic of the sentence, as in the following: As for the little girl, the dog bit her. It was the little girl that the dog bit. The case of expletives is sometimes rather complex. Consider sentences with expletives (meaningless subjects), like: It is raining.
For the use of would after the verb wish and the expression if only, see § Expressions of wish. The auxiliary verbs could and might can also be used to indicate the conditional mood, as in the following: If the opportunity were here, I could do the job. (= ... I would be able to do ... ) If the opportunity were here, I might do the job ...
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb phrase (although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar [23]). A verb phrase headed by a finite verb may also be called a predicate .
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. [1] [2]: 181 [3] That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.).
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Here, a verb is prefixed by a morpheme which encodes number and person of the subject. These prefixes come in two versions, realis and irrealis . Which one is chosen depends on whether the verb refers to an actual past or present event (realis), or merely to a possible or imagined event (irrealis).