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Non-finite Verb
Non-finite verbs, are verb forms that do not show tense, person, or number. They include: # Infinitives (e.g., to go, to see) - They often function as nouns or the base form of a verb # Gerunds (e.g., going, seeing) - These act as nouns but are derived from verbs # Participles (e.g., gone, seen) - These can function as adjectives or part of verb tenses (like has gone) Nonfinite verbs are used in constructions where there's no need to express tense directly. They help in creating sentences like "I want to go," where "to go" is nonfinite. In the English language, a non-finite verb cannot perform action as the main verb of an independent clause. Non-finite verb forms in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines. The categories of mood, tense, and or voice may be absent from non-finite verb forms in some languages. Because English lacks most inflectional morphology, the finite and the non-finite forms of a verb may appear the same in a given context. Exam ...
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Catena (linguistics)
In linguistics, a catena (English pronunciation: , plural catenas or catenae; from Latin for "chain") is a unit of syntax and morphology (linguistics), morphology, closely associated with dependency grammars. It is a more flexible and inclusive unit than the constituent (linguistics), constituent and its proponents therefore consider it to be better suited than the constituent to serve as the fundamental unit of syntactic and morphosyntactic analysis. The catena has served as the basis for the analysis of a number of phenomena of syntax, such as idiom, idiosyncratic meaning, Ellipsis (linguistics), ellipsis mechanisms (e.g. gapping, stripping (linguistics), stripping, Verb phrase ellipsis, VP-ellipsis, pseudogapping, sluicing, answer ellipsis, comparative deletion), predicate (grammar), predicate-verb argument, argument structures, and Discontinuity (linguistics), discontinuities (topicalization, wh-fronting, Scrambling (linguistics), scrambling, extraposition, etc.). The catena co ...
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Germanic Weak Verb
In the Germanic languages, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, and are therefore often regarded as the norm (the regular verbs). They are distinguished from the Germanic strong verbs by the fact that their past tense form is marked by an inflection containing a , , or sound (as in English ''I walk~I walked'') rather than by changing the verb's root vowel (as in English ''I rise~I rose''). Whereas the strong verbs are the oldest group of verbs in Germanic, originating in Indo-European, the weak verbs arose as an innovation in proto-Germanic. Originally the weak verbs consisted of new verbs coined from pre-existing nouns (for example the noun ''name'' was turned into the verb ''to name''), or coined from strong verbs to express the sense of causing the action denoted by that strong verb (for example the strong verb ''to rise'' was turned into the weak verb ''to raise''). However, over time, the weak verbs have become the normal form of verbs in all Germanic languag ...
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Germanic Languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English language, English, is also the world's most List of languages by total number of speakers, widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic language, Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia, History of Germany#Iron Age, Iron Age Northern Germany and along the North Sea and Baltic coasts. The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English language, English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German language, German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch language, Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch origi ...
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Germanic Strong Verb
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of Indo-European ablaut, changes to the stem vowel. A minority of verbs in any Germanic language are strong; the majority are ''Germanic weak verb, weak verbs'', which form the past tense by means of a dental consonant, dental suffix. In modern English, strong verbs include ''sing'' (present ''I sing'', simple past, past ''I sang'', past participle ''I have sung'') and ''drive'' (present ''I drive'', past ''I drove'', past participle ''I have driven''), as opposed to weak verbs such as ''open'' (present ''I open'', past ''I opened'', past participle ''I have opened''). Not all verbs with a change in the stem vowel are strong verbs, however: they may also be irregular weak verbs such as ''bring, brought, brought'' or ''keep, kept, kept''. The key distinction is that the system of strong verbs has its origin in the earliest sound system of Proto-Indo-European, whereas weak verbs use a dental ending ...
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Periphrastic
In linguistics and literature, periphrasis () is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periphrastic in comparison to "happier", and English "I will eat" is periphrastic in comparison to Spanish . The term originates from the Greek worπεριφράζομαι 'talking around', and was originally used for examples that came up in ancient Greek. In epic poetry, it was common to use periphrasis in examples such as "the sons of the Achaeans" (meaning the Achaeans), or "How did such words escape the fence of your teeth?" (adding a layer of poetic imagery to "your teeth"). Sometimes periphrastic forms were used for verbs that would otherwise be unpronounceable. For example, the verb δείκνυμι 'to show', has a hypothetical form * , which has the disallowed consonant cluster , so one would instead say , using a periphrasis with a ...
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Grammatical Voice
In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to formulate rules that define well-formed, grammatical sentences. These rules of grammaticality also provide explanations of ill-formed, ungrammatical sentences. In theoretical linguistics, a speaker's judgement on the well-formedness of a linguistic 'string'—called a grammaticality judgement—is based on whether the sentence is interpreted in accordance with the rules and constraints of the relevant grammar. If the rules and constraints of the particular lect are followed, then the sentence is judged to be grammatical. In contrast, an ungrammatical sentence is one that violates the rules of the given language variety. Linguists use grammaticality judgements to investigate the syntactic structure of sentences. Generative linguists are larg ...
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Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect). Certain aspectual distinctions express a relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect, which indicates that an event occurred prior to but has continuing relevance at the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual disti ...
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Canonical
The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean 'according to the canon' the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, ''canonical example'' is often used to mean 'archetype'. Science and technology * Canonical form, a natural unique representation of an object, or a preferred notation for some object Mathematics * * Canonical coordinates, sets of coordinates that can be used to describe a physical system at any given point in time * Canonical map, a morphism that is uniquely defined by its main property * Canonical polyhedron, a polyhedron whose edges are all tangent to a common sphere, whose center is the average of its vertices * Canonical ring, a graded ring associated to an algebraic variety * Canonical injection, in set theory * Canonical representative, in set theory a standard member of each element of a set partition Differential geometry * Canonical one-f ...
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Gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ger) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, it is one that functions as a noun. The name is derived from Late Latin ''gerundium,'' meaning "which is to be carried out". In English, the gerund has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiable by an adverb and being able to take a direct object. The term "''-ing'' form" is often used in English to refer to the gerund specifically. Traditional grammar makes a distinction within ''-ing'' forms between present participles and gerunds, a distinction that is not observed in such modern grammars as '' A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' and '' The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language''. Traditional use The Latin gerund, in a restricted set of syntactic contexts, denotes the sense of the verb in isolation after certain prepositions, and in certain uses of the genitive, dative, and ablative cases. It ...
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Participle
In linguistics, a participle (; abbr. ) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a ''laughing face''". "Participle" is a traditional grammatical term from Greek and Latin that is widely used for corresponding verb forms in European languages and analogous forms in Sanskrit and Arabic grammar. In particular, Greek and Latin participles are inflected for gender, number and case, but also conjugated for tense and voice and can take prepositional and adverbial modifiers. Cross-linguistically, participles may have a range of functions apart from adjectival modification. In European and Indian languages, the past participle is used to form the passive voice. In English, participles are also associated with periphrastic verb forms ( continuous and perfect) and are widely used in adverbial clauses. In non- ...
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Modal Verb
A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''ability'', ''permission'', ''request'', ''capacity'', ''suggestion'', ''order'', ''obligation'', ''necessity'', ''possibility'' or ''advice''. Modal verbs generally accompany the base (infinitive) form of another verb having semantic content. In English, the modal verbs commonly used are ''can'', ''could'', ''may'', ''might'', ''must'', ''shall'', ''should'', ''will'', ''would'', and ''ought''. Function Modal verbs have a wide variety of communicative functions, but these functions can generally be related to a scale ranging from possibility ("may") to necessity ("must"), in terms of one of the following types of modality: *epistemic modality, concerned with the theoretical ''possibility of propositions being true or not true'' (including likelihood and certainty) * deontic modality, concerned with ''possibility and necessity in terms of freedom to act'' (including permission and dut ...
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