Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Subject–auxiliary inversion (SAI; also called subject–operator inversion) is a frequently occurring type of inversion in the English language whereby a finite auxiliary verb – taken here to include finite forms of the copula be – appears to "invert" (change places) with the subject. [1]
In the English examples, the verb roll agrees in number with cars, implying that the latter is still the syntactic subject of the sentence, despite being in a noncanonical subject position. However, in the Zulu example of locative inversion, it is the noun isikole , "school" that controls subject-verb agreement, despite not being the semantic ...
Such sentences are more consistent with a theory that takes sentence structure to be relatively flat, lacking a finite verb phrase constituent, i.e. lacking the VP of S → NP VP. In order to maintain the traditional subject–predicate division, one has to assume movement (or copying) on a massive scale. The basic difficulty is suggested by ...
While English has a relatively simple conjugation, other languages such as French and Arabic or Spanish are more complex, with each verb having dozens of conjugated forms. Some languages such as Georgian and Basque (some verbs only) have highly complex conjugation systems with hundreds of possible conjugations for every verb.
Inverse copular constructions challenge one of the major dogmas of the theory of clause or sentence structure, i.e. that the two basic constituents of a sentence - the noun phrase (NP) and the verb phrase (VP) - are associated with the logical/grammatical functions of subject and predicate (cf. phrase structure rules and sentence). In fact ...
In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
The English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing. These contrived examples are relatively simple, whereas actual inflected languages have a far more complicated set of declensions, where the suffixes (or prefixes, or infixes ) change depending on the gender of the noun , the quantity of the noun , and ...
In informal speech of English, the copula may also be dropped in general sentences, as in "She a nurse." It is a feature of African-American Vernacular English, but is also used by a variety of other English speakers. An example is the sentence "I saw twelve men, each a soldier." [11]