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In linguistics, a comparative illusion (CI) or Escher sentence [a] is a comparative sentence which initially seems to be acceptable but upon closer reflection has no well-formed, sensical meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is More people have been to Russia than I have .
Any sentence that requires a play on those different meanings will not work the same way in Chinese. In fact, very simple concepts in English can sometimes be difficult to translate, for example, there is no single direct translation for the word "yes" in Chinese, as in Chinese the affirmative is said by repeating the verb in the question.
In an experiment by Cairns et al., preschool children aged 4–6 were presented sentences such as (14) and (15) orally. (To make sure that the meaning of the sentences was clear to the children, sentences were enacted with toys.) While sentence (14) is well-formed in the adult grammar, sentence (15) is not, as indicated by the asterisk (*).
"I don't know nothing". In Russian, "I know nothing" is я ничего не знаю [ya nichevo nye znayu], lit. "I don't know nothing". Negating the verb without negating the pronoun (or vice versa), while syntactically correct, may result in a very unusual meaning or make no sense at all.
One of the first writers to have attempted to provide the sentence meaning through context is Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao (1997). [9] Chao's poem, entitled Making Sense Out of Nonsense: The Story of My Friend Whose "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (after Noam Chomsky) was published in 1971. This poem attempts to explain what ...
The garden-path sentence effect occurs when the sentence has a phrase or word with an ambiguous meaning that the reader interprets in a certain way and, when they read the whole sentence, there is a difference in what has been read and what was expected. The reader must then read and evaluate the sentence again to understand its meaning.
Since no markers exist to point out present or past time, Hopi, like many other languages, can be said to be endowed with a future-nonfuture tense system. [46] Malotki does admit that the English and Hopi systems of tense are different since the English system distinguishes past from non-past, whereas Hopi distinguishes future from non-future. [47]
Literal translation, direct translation, or word-for-word translation is the translation of a text done by translating each word separately without analysing how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. [1] In translation theory, another term for literal translation is metaphrase (as opposed to paraphrase for an analogous translation).