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Object abstraction, or simply abstraction, is a concept wherein terms for objects become used for more abstract concepts, which in some languages develop into further abstractions such as verbs and grammatical words (grammaticalisation). Abstraction is common in human language, though it manifests in different ways for different languages.
Similarly, some abstract nouns have developed etymologically by figurative extension from literal roots (drawback, fraction, holdout, uptake). Many abstract nouns in English are formed by adding a suffix (-ness, -ity, -ion) to adjectives or verbs (happiness and serenity from the adjectives happy and serene; circulation from the verb circulate).
When the prefix "re-" is added to a monosyllabic word, the word gains currency both as a noun and as a verb. Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or ...
For example, in Serbo-Croatian, the Old Church Slavonic verb xъtěti ("to want/to wish") has gone from a content word (hoće hoditi "s/he wants to walk") to an auxiliary verb in phonetically reduced form (on/ona će hoditi "s/he will walk") to a clitic (hoditi će), and finally to a fused inflection (hodiće "s/he will walk").
For example, it is difficult to agree to whether concepts like God, the number three, and goodness are real, abstract, or both. An approach to resolving such difficulty is to use predicates as a general term for whether things are variously real, abstract, concrete, or of a particular property (e.g., good ).
For some verbs in some languages, the difference between perfective and imperfective conveys an additional meaning difference; in such cases, the two aspects are typically translated using separate verbs in English. In Greek, for example, the imperfective sometimes adds the notion of "try to do something" (the so-called conative imperfect ...
For example, in English the verb move has no grammatical object in he moves (though in this case, the subject itself may be an implied object, also expressible explicitly as in he moves himself); but in he moves the car, the subject and object are distinct and the verb has a different valency.
The light verb loses its own independent meaning and instead "lends a certain shade of meaning" [9] to the main or stem verb, which "comprises the lexical core of the compound". [10] While any verb can act as a main verb, there is a limited set of productive light verbs. [ 11 ]