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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 .
For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog" but the topic is "the little girl". 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 ...
The sentence appears on a computer monitor word-by-word. After each word, participants were asked to choose if the sentence is still grammatical so far. Then they would go on to rate the sentence from 1 "perfectly good English" to 7 "really bad English." The result showed that ungrammatical sentences were rated to be better than the grammatical ...
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
Sentences are then built up out of atomic sentences by applying connectives and quantifiers. A set of sentences is called a theory; thus, individual sentences may be called theorems. To properly evaluate the truth (or falsehood) of a sentence, one must make reference to an interpretation of the theory.
For example, (2) 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. These sentences (1 and 2, etc.) have come to be called the "T-sentences". The reason they look trivial is that the object language and the metalanguage are both English; here is an example where the object language is German and the metalanguage is English:
Scrambling is a syntactic phenomenon wherein sentences can be formulated using a variety of different word orders without a substantial change in meaning. Instead the reordering of words, from their canonical position, has consequences on their contribution to the discourse (i.e., the information's "newness" to the conversation).
Dummett believes a speaker must know three components of a sentence to understand its meaning: a theory of sense, indicating the part of the meaning that the speaker grasps; a theory of reference, which indicates what claims about the world are made by the sentence, and a theory of force, which indicates what kind of speech act the expression ...