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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.
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.
If the sentence has an auxiliary verb, the subject is placed after the auxiliary and the main verb. For example: a. A unicorn will come into the room. b. Into the room will come a unicorn. Since this type of inversion generally places the focus on the subject, the subject is likely to be a full noun or noun phrase rather than a pronoun.
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 spoken language, this focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation. In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as ...
The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb. For "Kate ate a piece of cake", the possibilities are: "Kati megevett egy szelet tortát." (same word order as English) ["Kate ate a piece of cake."] "Egy szelet tortát Kati evett meg."
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 .
In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of a verb and its arguments except the subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause.Thus, in the sentence A fat man quickly put the money into the box, the words quickly put the money into the box constitute a verb phrase; it consists of the verb put and its arguments, but not the subject a fat man.
- Subject–verb–object inversion here possible, but less likely, with weak definite subject pronoun. Subject–verb inversion has occurred in the b-sentences to emphasize the post-verb subject. The emphasis may occur, for instance, to establish a contrast of the subject with another entity in the discourse context.