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An example of signifyin' is "playing the dozens". The dozens is a game in which participants seek to outdo each other by throwing insults back and forth. Tom Kochman offered as an example in Rappin' and Stylin' Out: Communication in Urban Black America (1972): " Yo momma sent her picture to the lonely hearts club, but they sent it back and said ...
Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play The Importance of Being Earnest, Ernest being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective earnest). Word play is ...
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 whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
Words that carry meaning; usually nouns, verbs and sometimes adjectives and adverbs. Context clues Clues used when guessing word meanings; clues that provide students with meaning or comprehension based on the environment in which a word is found. Contrastive analysis Comparing two languages to predict where learning will be facilitated and ...
Circumlocution is often used by beginner and intermediate second language speakers to convey the meaning of a word they don't know in their target language. Relative clauses are often used for circumlocution in English. [4] For example, [Firefighters] are the people who you call when your house is on fire.
For example, a person may be described as stubborn or tenacious, both of which have the same basic meaning but are opposite in terms of their emotional background (the first is an insult, while the second is a compliment).
Most capitalized adjectives derive from proper nouns; for example, the proper adjective American derives from the proper noun America. Sometimes, an adjective is capitalized because it designates an ethnic group with a shared culture, heritage, or ancestry. This usage asserts the existence of a unified group with common goals.
Such adjective phrases can be integrated into the clause (e.g., Love dies young) or detached from the clause as a supplement (e.g., Happy to see her, I wept). Adjective phrases functioning as predicative adjuncts are typically interpreted with the subject of the main clause being the predicand of the adjunct (i.e., "I was happy to see her"). [11]