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Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky): example that is grammatically correct but based on semantic combinations that are contradictory and therefore would not normally occur.
The following example shows the difference between e and ae when applied in the same sentence. [17] Ngaei rong pwa Soahn e laid. ‘I heard that John was fishing (I am certain about it).’ Ngaei rong pwa Soahn ae laid. ‘I heard that John was fishing (but I am not certain about it).’ The use of ae instead of e can also indicate an ...
[43] This example, first discussed by Peter Cathcart Wason and Shuli Reich in 1979, is very often initially perceived as having the meaning "No head injury should be ignored—even if it's trivial", even though upon careful consideration the sentence actually says "All head injuries should be ignored—even trivial ones." The authors illustrate ...
Under this view, the sentence about Donovan would have the primary proposition "Donovan is poor and happy" and the secondary proposition "There is a contrast between poverty and happiness". The sentence about yewberry jelly contains the two propositions "Yewberry jelly will give you an awful stomachache" and "Yewberry jelly is toxic in the ...
[1] [2] As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: [1] "The dog chased a cat." "A cat chased the dog." Hypothetically speaking, suppose English were a language with a more complex declension system in which cases were formed by adding the suffixes:
Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2] At smaller scales, it may refer to rules shared by smaller groups of speakers. A description, study, or analysis of such rules may also be known as a grammar, or as a grammar book.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
At the grammatical level, differences may involve pronunciation, inflection, and/or syntax (sentence structure). Differences can range from minor (although conspicuous) to extreme. In many cases of diglossia, the two dialects are so divergent that they are distinct languages as defined by linguists: they are not mutually intelligible.