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For example, if the writer wanted to rewrite the above examples, he could write: Bells rang. Their resonance filled the air with clangor, startling pigeons into flight from every belfry. Upon hearing the sounds, the townspeople rushed into the streets. They all stood in silence and awaited the news. She drove to the movies.
The word verbosity comes from Latin verbosus, "wordy". There are many other English words that also refer to the use of excessive words. Prolixity comes from Latin prolixus, "extended". Prolixity can also be used to refer to the length of a monologue or speech, especially a formal address such as a lawyer's oral argument. [2]
A formal grammar describes which strings from an alphabet of a formal language are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. A formal grammar is defined as a set of production rules for such strings in a formal language.
In contrast, formal English requires an overt subject in each clause. A sentence may not need a subject to have valid meaning, but to satisfy the syntactic requirement for an explicit subject a pleonastic (or dummy pronoun) is used; only the first sentence in the following pair is acceptable English: "It's raining." "Is raining."
A special case of semantic syllepsis occurs when a word or phrase is used both in its figurative and literal sense at the same time. [3] Then, it is not necessary for the governing phrase to relate to two parts of the sentence. One example is in an advertisement for a transport company: "We go a long way for you."
Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period [1] A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are ...
In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence. [1] This generally includes only those aspects of information that "respond to the temporary state of the addressee's mind", and excludes other aspects of linguistic information such as references to background (encyclopedic/common) knowledge ...
Clipping is also different from back-formation, which proceeds by (pseudo-)morpheme rather than segment, and where the new word may differ in sense and word class from its source. [2] In English, clipping may extend to contraction, which mostly involves the elision of a vowel that is replaced by an apostrophe in writing.