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The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
English tag questions, when they have the grammatical form of a question, are atypically complex, because they vary according to at least three factors: the choice of auxiliary, the negation and the intonation pattern. This is unique among the Germanic languages, but the Celtic languages operate in a very similar way.
If you had written (not: would have written), it would have put my mind at rest. However, some varieties of English regularly use would (contracted to 'd) and would have (' d have) in counterfactual condition clauses, although this is often considered non-standard: If you'd leave (standard: you left) now, you'd be on time.
The verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms (has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/). The verb be has the largest number of irregular forms ( am, is, are in the present tense, was, were in the past tense, been for the past participle).
While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque (some verbs only) have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.
Languages with rich nominal inflection (using grammatical cases for many purposes) typically have a number of identifiable declension classes, or groups of nouns with a similar pattern of case inflection or declension. Sanskrit has six declension classes, whereas Latin is traditionally considered to have five, and Ancient Greek three. [23]
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Simple sentences in the Reed–Kellogg system are diagrammed according to these forms: The diagram of a simple sentence begins with a horizontal line called the base.The subject is written on the left, the predicate on the right, separated by a vertical bar that extends through the base.