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Nonfinite Verb
A nonfinite verb is a derivative form of a verb unlike finite verbs. Accordingly, nonfinite verb forms are inflected for neither number nor person, and they cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. In English, nonfinite verbs include infinitives, participles and gerunds. Nonfinite verb forms in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines. Formally, nonfinite verb forms lack the three grammatical features ( mood, tense and voice) that are "associated, independently or relatively, with ... the act of predication." Generally, they also lack a subject dependent. One or more nonfinite verbs may be associated with a finite verb in a finite clause: the elements of a verb catena, or verb chain. Because English lacks most inflectional morphology, the finite and the nonfinite forms of a verb may appear the same in a given context. Examples The following sentences each contain one finite verb (underlined) and multiple nonfinite verbs (in bold): ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morphological Derivation
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as For example, ''unhappy'' and ''happiness'' derive from the root word ''happy.'' It is differentiated from inflection, which is the modification of a word to form different grammatical categories without changing its core meaning: ''determines'', ''determining'', and ''determined'' are from the root ''determine''. Derivational patterns Derivational morphology often involves the addition of a derivational suffix or other affix. Such an affix usually applies to words of one lexical category (part of speech) and changes them into words of another such category. For example, one effect of the English derivational suffix ''-ly'' is to change an adjective into an adverb (''slow'' → ''slowly''). Here are examples of English derivational patterns and their suffixes: * adjective-to-noun: ''-ness'' (''slow'' → ''slowness'') * adjective ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subject (grammar)
The subject in a simple English sentence such as ''John runs'', ''John is a teacher'', or ''John drives a car'', is the person or thing about whom the statement is made, in this case ''John''. Traditionally the subject is the word or phrase which controls the verb in the clause, that is to say with which the verb agrees (''John is'' but ''John and Mary are''). If there is no verb, as in ''John what an idiot!'', or if the verb has a different subject, as in ''John I can't stand him!'', then 'John' is not considered to be the grammatical subject, but can be described as the '' topic'' of the sentence. While these definitions apply to simple English sentences, defining the subject is more difficult in more complex sentences and in languages other than English. For example, in the sentence ''It is difficult to learn French'', the subject seems to be the word ''it'', and yet arguably the real subject (the thing that is difficult) is ''to learn French''. A sentence such as ''It was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Native American Languages
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large number of language isolates), as well as a number of extinct languages that are unclassified because of a lack of data. Many proposals have been made to relate some or all of these languages to each other, with varying degrees of success. The most notorious is Joseph Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis, which however nearly all specialists reject because of severe methodological flaws; spurious data; and a failure to distinguish cognation, contact, and coincidence. Nonetheless, there are indications that some of the recognized families are related to each other, such as widespread similarities in pronouns (e.g., ''n''/''m'' is a common pattern for 'I'/'you' across western North America, and ''ch''/''k''/''t'' for 'I'/'you'/'we' is similarly found ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perfect (grammar)
The perfect tense or aspect (abbreviated or ) is a verb form that indicates that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the time under consideration, often focusing attention on the resulting state rather than on the occurrence itself. An example of a perfect construction is ''I have made dinner.'' Although this gives information about a prior action (the speaker's making of the dinner), the focus is likely to be on the present consequences of that action (the fact that the dinner is now ready). The word ''perfect'' in this sense means "completed" (from Latin ''perfectum'', which is the perfect passive participle of the verb ''perficere'' "to complete"). In traditional Latin and Ancient Greek grammar, the perfect tense is a particular, conjugated-verb form. Modern analyses view the perfect constructions of these languages as combining elements of grammatical tense (such as time reference) and grammatical aspect. The Greek perfect tense is contrasted with the aorist a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germanic Weak Verb
In the Germanic languages, weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, 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 /ð/ 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germanic Languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the 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, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germanic Strong Verb
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is a verb that marks its past tense by means of changes to the stem vowel ( ablaut). The majority of the remaining verbs form the past tense by means of a dental suffix (e.g. ''-ed'' in English), and are known as '' weak verbs''. In modern English, strong verbs include ''sing'' (present ''I sing'', 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 most strong verbs have their origin in the earliest sound system of Proto-Indo-European, whereas weak verbs use a dental ending (in English usually ''-ed'' or ''-t'') that developed later with t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Periphrastic
In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one inflected word. The word ''periphrasis'' originates from the Greek word ''periphrazein'', which means ''talking around''. Periphrastic forms are a characteristic of analytic languages, whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthetic languages. While periphrasis concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catena. The verb catenae of English (verb phrases constructed with auxiliary verbs) are highly periphrastic. Examples The distinction between inflected and periphrastic forms is usually illustrated across distinct languages. However, comparative and superlative forms of adjectives (and adverbs) in English provide a straightforward illustration of the phenomenon. For many speakers, both the simple an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Aspect
In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively 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 distinction ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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- ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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'', 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'', ''shall'', ''should'', ''will'', ''would'', ''ought to'', ''used to'', ''dare'' and ''must.'' Function A modal auxiliary verb gives information about the function of the main verb that it governs. Modals 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 ''p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
