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  2. Not! - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..._Not!

    A declarative statement is made, followed by a pause, and then an emphatic "not!" adverb is postfixed. The result is a surprise negation of the original declarative statement. According to the above, the phrase, "He is a nice guy... not!" is synonymous to "He is not a nice guy". Whereas the latter structure is a neutral observation, the former ...

  3. Negative inversion - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_inversion

    The paraphrases below the examples restate the meaning of each sentence. When negative inversion occurs as in the a-sentences, the meaning is much different than when it does not occur as in the b-sentences. The meaning difference is a reflection of the varying status of the fronted expressions.

  4. Double negative - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative

    This is typically used to convey a different shade of meaning from a strictly positive sentence ("You're not unattractive" vs "You're attractive"). Multiple negation is the more general term referring to the occurrence of more than one negative in a clause. In some languages, double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative; in ...

  5. Sentence (linguistics) - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics)

    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."

  6. Syntactic Structures - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_Structures

    It is a sentence pronounced with a "normal sentence intonation". It is also "recall[ed] much more quickly" and "learn[ed] much more easily". [61] Chomsky then analyzes further about the basis of "grammaticality." He shows three ways that do not determine whether a sentence is grammatical or not. First, a grammatical sentence need not be ...

  7. List of linguistic example sentences - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example...

    There is no convincing evidence that Churchill said this, and good reason to believe that he did not.) [19] [20] The sentence "does not demonstrate the absurdity of using [prepositional phrase] fronting instead of stranding; it merely illustrates the ungrammaticality resulting from fronting something that is not a constituent". [21] [22]

  8. Function word - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_word

    In linguistics, function words (also called functors) [1] are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that ...

  9. Common English usage misconceptions - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_English_usage...

    / "Inflammable" can only mean "not flammable." The word "inflammable" can be derived by two different constructions, both following standard rules of English grammar: appending the suffix -able to the word inflame creates a word meaning "able to be inflamed", while adding the prefix in-to the word flammable creates a word meaning "not flammable".