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English parts of speech are based on Latin and Greek parts of speech. [40] Some English grammar rules were adopted from Latin , for example John Dryden is thought to have created the rule no sentences can end in a preposition because Latin cannot end sentences in prepositions.
There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar. Fluency in a particular language variety involves a speaker internalizing these rules, many or most of which are acquired by observing other speakers, as opposed to intentional study or instruction.
Languages often show different kinds of grammar for sentences that introduce new topics and those that continue discussing previously established topics. When a sentence continues discussing a previously established topic, it is likely to use pronouns to refer to the topic. Such topics tend to be subjects. In many languages, pronouns referring ...
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
Almost all languages have the word classes noun and verb, but beyond these two there are significant variations among different languages. [5] For example: Japanese has as many as three classes of adjectives, where English has one. Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese have a class of nominal classifiers.
Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed result in a view of sentence structure that is constituency-based. Thus, grammars that employ phrase structure rules are constituency grammars (= phrase structure grammars), as opposed to dependency grammars, [4] which view sentence structure as dependency-based. What this means is that for ...
Many modern linguists, including Sprouse, [9] support this idea. Acceptability judgments, on the other hand, fall in a continuous spectrum. [9] [7] Sentences may either be clearly acceptable or clearly unacceptable, but there are also sentences that are partially acceptable. Hence, according to Sprouse, the difference between grammaticality and ...
Prepositions have a wide range of uses in English. They are used to describe movement, place, and other relations between different entities, but they also have many syntactic uses such as introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs. [210]