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Generally, context and auxiliary words like "already", "at present", etc. sometimes are enough to inform us that the condition has present meaning, but sometimes are not, which leads to ambiguity, for example: If you do it now, you will not have to do it later. The word "now" can be interpreted as "at present" or "in the immediate future".
A conditional sentence is a sentence in a natural language that expresses that one thing is contingent on another, e.g., "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the sentence’s main clause is conditional on a subordinate clause.
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.
If the frame of reference is a time in the past, or a period that ended in the past, the past tense is used instead. For example: I wrote a letter this morning (it is now afternoon); He produced ten plays (he is now dead or his career is considered over, or a particular past time period is being referred to); They never traveled abroad (similarly).
Demonstrations of sentences where the semantic interpretation is bound to context or knowledge of the world. The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam: ambiguous use of a pronoun: The word "it" refers to the table being made of Styrofoam; but "it" would immediately refer to the large ball if we replaced ...
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez requested that, going forward, members of the committee “elevate to the promise of our duties”. “This is an embarrassment, to the time and people of this country,” she said.
Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of single utterances (sentences) without context.