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A double negative is a construction occurring when two forms of grammatical negation are used in the same sentence. This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence ("You're not unattractive" vs "You're attractive"). Multiple negation is the more general term referring to the occurrence of more ...
Intonation (linguistics) In linguistics, intonation is the variation in pitch used to indicate the speaker's attitudes and emotions, to highlight or focus an expression, to signal the illocutionary act performed by a sentence, or to regulate the flow of discourse.
A figure of speech or rhetorical figure is a word or phrase that intentionally deviates from straightforward language use or literal meaning to produce a rhetorical or intensified effect (emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, etc.). [1][2] In the distinction between literal and figurative language, figures of speech constitute the latter.
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
Pleonasm. Pleonasm (/ ˈpliː.əˌnæzəm /; from Ancient Greek πλεονασμός (pleonasmós), from πλέον (pléon) 'to be in excess') [1][2] is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," [3] or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional ...
Constituent (linguistics) In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. The constituent structure of sentences is identified using tests for constituents. [1] These tests apply to a portion of a sentence, and the results provide evidence about the constituent ...
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. [1] In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb – that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action or has its state changed. [2] This contrasts with active voice, in which the ...
References on English usage strongly criticize the phrase as "ugly" [2] and "Janus-faced". [4] William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, in their classic The Elements of Style–recognized by Time one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books written in English since 1923, [6] say and/or is "A device, or shortcut, that damages a sentence and often leads to confusion or ambiguity". [3]