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This simple sentence has one independent clause which contains one subject, dog, and one predicate, barked and howled at the cat. This predicate has two verbs, known as a compound predicate: barked and howled. (This should not be confused with a compound sentence.) In the backyard and at the cat are prepositional phrases. Compound sentences
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." [39] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous.
Sentence (linguistics) 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.
Sentence diagram. A sentence diagram is a pictorial representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. The term "sentence diagram" is used more when teaching written language, where sentences are diagrammed. The model shows the relations between words and the nature of sentence structure and can be used as a tool to help recognize which ...
Inverted sentence. An inverted sentence is a sentence in a normally subject-first language in which the predicate (verb) comes before the subject (noun). Down the street lived the man and his wife without anyone suspecting that they were really spies for a foreign power. Because there is no object following the verb, the noun phrase after the ...
The five basic sentence forms (or "structures") in English are the declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative and the optative. These correspond to the discourse functions statement, question, exclamation, and command respectively. The different forms involve different combinations in word order, the addition of certain auxiliaries or ...
Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause ...
Periodic sentence. A periodic sentence is a sentence with a stylistic device featuring syntactical subordination to a single main idea, which usually is not complete until the very end of the sentence. [1] The periodic sentence emphasizes its main idea by placing it at the end, following all the subordinate clauses and other modifiers that ...