Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky): example that is grammatically correct but based on semantic combinations that are contradictory and therefore would not normally occur.
A typical sentence contains one independent clause and possibly one or more dependent clauses, although it is also possible to link together sentences of this form into longer sentences, using coordinating conjunctions (see above).
The declarative sentence is the most common kind of sentence in language, in most situations, and in a way can be considered the default function of a sentence. What this means essentially is that when a language modifies a sentence in order to form a question or give a command, the base form will always be the declarative.
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.
In Modern English, verbless clauses are common as the complement of with or without. [3]: 1267 Other prepositions such as although, once, when, and while also take verbless clause complements, such as Although no longer a student, she still dreamed of the school, [3]: 1267 in which the predicand corresponds to the subject of the main clause, she.
Those associated with closed-ended questions are whether and if. [a] The main role of these words is to mark a clause as interrogative. For example, How did you do it? is marked as an interrogative clause by the presence of how, and in I wonder whether it's true, whether marks the subordinate clause whether it's true as interrogative.
Although many examples of wh-movement form questions, wh-movement also occurs in relative clauses. [8] Many relative pronouns in English have the same form as the corresponding interrogative words (which, who, where, etc.). Relative clauses are subordinate clauses, so the same V3 word order occurs. a. I read Fred's paper. b.
An example of an indirect question is where Jack is in the sentence "I wonder where Jack is." English and many other languages do not use inversion in indirect questions, even though they would in the corresponding direct question ("Where is Jack?"), as described in the following section.