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Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural –s morpheme.
The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman nom (other forms include nomme, and noun itself). The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number.
In the first Swahili example, the noun has the prefix m-because it is part of class 1 for human beings. The prefix m-then agrees with the adjective m-dogo. The verb agreement is different simply because the verb agreement for class 1 is a-rather than m-. The second example has the prefix ki-because the noun basket is part of class 7. Class 7 ...
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").
Types of English compound nouns Type Description Examples Spaced (or open) The words are not visibly connected in writing. place name, ice cream: Hyphenated A hyphen is used to join the words. place-name, hunter-gatherer: Solid (or closed) When written, there is no space or intervening punctuation. placename, scarecrow
For example, "I" may be a pronoun or a Roman numeral; "to" may be a preposition or an infinitive marker; "time" may be a noun or a verb. Also, a single spelling can represent more than one root word. For example, "singer" may be a form of either "sing" or "singe". Different corpora may treat such difference differently.
A modern English example is "painted Jezebel" as a disapproving expression for a woman too fond of using cosmetics. Kennings may include proper names. A modern example of this is an ad hoc usage by a helicopter ambulance pilot: "the Heathrow of hang gliders " for the hills behind Hawes in Yorkshire in England, when he found the air over the ...