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When two negatives are used in one independent clause, in standard English the negatives are understood to cancel one another and produce a weakened affirmative (see the Robert Lowth citation below): this is known as litotes. However, depending on how such a sentence is constructed, in some dialects if a verb or adverb is in between two ...
To convey that there's no way you could be less concerned, the correct phrase is "I couldn't care less." We've pretty much all messed this one up, though it makes sense when you think about it ...
Noun phrases combined into a longer noun phrase, such as John, Eric, and Jill, the red coat or the blue one. When and is used, the resulting noun phrase is plural. A determiner does not need to be repeated with the individual elements: the cat, the dog, and the mouse and the cat, dog, and mouse are both correct.
Lodgings to Let, an 1814 engraving featuring a double entendre. He: "My sweet honey, I hope you are to be let with the Lodgins!" She: "No, sir, I am to be let alone".. A double entendre [note 1] (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, one of which is typically obvious, and the other often conveys a message that ...
A few languages have specific parts of speech that distinguish between two number categories: one or two, and more than two. The former category can be thought of as a single conflated singular-dual number. [257] For example, in the nouns of Kalaw Lagaw Ya: [258] [259] ùmay - "dog(s)" (one or two) ùmayl - "dogs" (plural, three or more)
A special case of semantic syllepsis occurs when a word or phrase is used both in its figurative and literal sense at the same time. [3] Then, it is not necessary for the governing phrase to relate to two parts of the sentence. One example is in an advertisement for a transport company: "We go a long way for you."
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In linguistics, a disjunct is a type of adverbial adjunct that expresses information that is not considered essential to the sentence it appears in, but which is considered to be the speaker's or writer's attitude towards, or descriptive statement of, the propositional content of the sentence, "expressing, for example, the speaker's degree of truthfulness or his manner of speaking."