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Anticausative
An anticausative verb (abbreviated ) is an intransitive verb that shows an event affecting its subject, while giving no semantic or syntactic indication of the cause of the event. The single argument of the anticausative verb (its subject) is a patient, that is, what undergoes an action. One can assume that there is a cause or an agent of causation, but the syntactic structure of the anticausative makes it unnatural or impossible to refer to it directly. Examples of anticausative verbs are ''break'', ''sink'', ''move'', etc. Anticausative verbs are a subset of unaccusative verbs. Although the terms are generally synonymous, some unaccusative verbs are more obviously anticausative, while others (''fall'', ''die'', etc.) are not; it depends on whether causation is defined as having to do with an animate volitional agent (does "falling" mean "being accelerated down by gravity" or "being dropped/pushed down by someone"? Is "old age" a causation agent for "dying"?). A distinction must ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Causative Alternation
In linguistics, causative alternation is a phenomenon in which certain verbs that express a change of state (or a change of degree) can be used transitively or intransitively.Levin, Beth. "Causative Alternation". ''English Verb Classes and Alternations''. Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1993. 26–27. Print.Schäfer, Florian. 2009. "The Causative Alternation". Language and Linguistics Compass 3.2: 641. Print. A causatively alternating verb, called a labile or ergative verb, such as "open", has both a transitive meaning ("I opened the door") and an intransitive meaning ("The door opened"). When causatively alternating verbs are used transitively they are called causatives since, in the transitive use of the verb, the subject is ''causing'' the action denoted by the intransitive version. When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively, they are referred to as anticausatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the ''theme' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unaccusative Verb
In linguistics, an unaccusative verb is an intransitive verb whose grammatical subject is not a semantic agent. In other words, the subject does not actively initiate, or is not actively responsible for, the action expressed by the verb. An unaccusative verb's subject is semantically similar to the direct object of a transitive verb or to the subject of a verb in the passive voice. Examples in English are "the tree ''fell''"; "the window ''broke''". In those sentences, the action (falling, breaking) can be considered as something that happened to the subject, rather than being initiated by it. Semantically, the word "tree" in the sentence "the tree fell" plays a similar role as it does in a transitive sentence, such as "they cut down the tree", or its passive transformation "the tree was cut down". Unaccusative verbs thus contrast with unergative verbs, such as ''run'' or ''resign'', which describe actions voluntarily initiated by the subject. They are called ''unaccusative'' becau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ambitransitive Verb
An ambitransitive verb is a verb that is both intransitive and transitive.Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, Alexendra Y. Changing Valency: Case Studies in Transitivity. Cambridge University Press. This verb may or may not require a direct object. English has many ambitransitive verbs. Examples include ''read'', ''break'', and ''understand'' (e.g., "I read the book", saying what was read, or just "I read all afternoon"). Ambitransitive verbs are common in some languages, and much less so in other languages, where valency tends to be fixed, and there are explicit valency-changing operations (such as passive voice, antipassive voice, applicatives, causatives, etc.). Agentive and patientive Generally speaking, there are two types of ambitransitive verbs, distinguished by the alignment of the semantic roles of their arguments with their syntactic roles. Agentive Agentive (S = A) ambitransitives are those where the single argument of the intransitive (S) is agentive and it corresponds to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deponent Verbs
In linguistics, a deponent verb is a verb that is active in meaning but takes its form from a different voice, most commonly the middle or passive. A deponent verb has no active forms. Languages with deponent verbs ''This list may not be exhaustive.'' Ancient Greek Ancient Greek has middle-voice deponents (some of which are very common) and some passive-voice deponents. An example in classical Greek is (, 'I come' or 'I go'), middle/passive in form but translated into English using the active voice (since English has no middle voice). Some 'active' verbs will take middle-form futures, such as how (, 'I hear') becomes (, 'I will hear'), rather than the regular adding of a sigma (like (, 'I stop') becoming (, 'I will stop')). These are still translated into English as active. For these verbs, there is no future middle, but the future passive is unaffected. Koine Greek has a few verbs which have very different meanings in the active and middle/passive forms. For example, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Impersonal Passive Voice
The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero. Dixon, R. M. W. & Alexandra Aikhenvald (1997). "A Typology of Argument-Determined Constructions". In Bybee, Joan, John Haiman, & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.) ''Essays on Language Function and Language Type: Dedicated to T. Givón''. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 71–112. The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a '' dummy''. This placeholder has neither thematic nor referential content. (A similar example is the word "there" in the English phrase "There are three books.") In some languages, the deleted argument can be reintroduced as an '' oblique argument'' or ''complement''. Test of unergative verbs In most languages that allow impersonal passives, only unergative verbs may undergo impersonal passivization. Unaccusative ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Impersonal Verb
In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence "''It rains''", ''rain'' is an impersonal verb and the pronoun ''it'' does not refer to anything. In many languages the verb takes a third person singular inflection and often appears with an expletive subject. In the active voice, impersonal verbs can be used to express operation of nature, mental distress, and acts with no reference to the doer. Impersonal verbs are also called weather verbs because they frequently appear in the context of weather description. Also, indefinite pronouns may be called "impersonal", as they refer to an unknown person, like ''one'' or ''someone'', and there is overlap between the use of the two. Valency Impersonal verbs appear only in non-finite forms or with third-person inflection. In the third person, the subject is either implied or a dummy referring to people in general. The term "impersonal" simply means that the verb does not change acc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arabic Language
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston, 2011. Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arabs, Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece. Since the 7th century, Arabic has been characterized by diglossia, with an opposition between a standard Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige language—i.e., Literary Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic—and diverse vernacular varieties, which serve as First language, mother tongues. Colloquial dialects vary significantly from MSA, impeding mutual intelligibility. MSA is only acquired through formal education and is not spoken natively. It is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Glossing Abbreviations
This article lists common abbreviations for grammatical terms that are used in linguistic interlinear glossing of oral languages in English. The list provides conventional glosses as established by standard inventories of glossing abbreviations such as the Leipzig Glossing rules, the most widely known standard. These will generally be the glosses used on Wikipedia. Synonymous glosses are listed as alternatives for reference purposes. In a few cases, long and short standard forms are listed, intended for texts where that gloss is rare or common. Conventions * Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap (frequently abbreviated to ) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning. Similarly, (small) cap might be a locative suffix used in nominal inflections, prototypically ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Language
is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been many attempts to group the Japonic languages with other families such as the Ainu, Austroasiatic, Koreanic, and the now-discredited Altaic, but none of these proposals has gained widespread acceptance. Little is known of the language's prehistory, or when it first appeared in Japan. Chinese documents from the 3rd century AD recorded a few Japanese words, but substantial Old Japanese texts did not appear until the 8th century. From the Heian period (794–1185), there was a massive influx of Sino-Japanese vocabulary into the language, affecting the phonology of Early Middle Japanese. Late Middle Japanese (1185–1600) saw extensive grammatical changes and the first appearance of European loanwords. The basis of the standard dial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. South Slavic languages historically formed a continuum. The turbulent history of the area, particularly due to expansion of the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a patchwork of dialectal and religious differences. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread dialect in the western Balkans, intruding westwards into the area previously occupied by Chakavian and Kajkavian (which further blend into Slovenian in the northwest). Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs differ in religion and were historically often part of different cultural circles, although a large part ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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