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A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies."
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar , it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate .
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
List of linguistic example sentences; Polyptoton; Semantic satiation; Other linguistically complex sentences: James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher; Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (a Classical Chinese poem in which every syllable is pronounced as shi, though with varying tones).
It is also to be expected that the rules will generate syntactically correct but semantically nonsensical sentences, such as the following well-known example: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously This sentence was constructed by Noam Chomsky as an illustration that phrase structure rules are capable of generating syntactically correct but ...
A particularly long example is the opening stanza (lines 1-22) of Walt Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"; [12] another is the opening sentence of Milton's Paradise Lost. [13] A well-known example of a periodic sentence occurs in Nikolai Gogol's short story "The Overcoat": [14]
Impersonal sentences in Scottish Gaelic can occasionally have a very similar form to the first German example where an actor is omitted. In the following sentence, the word ‘chaidh’ ("went") is an auxiliary carrying tense and is used in an impersonal or passive constructions.