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In linguistic morphology a cranberry morpheme (also called unique morpheme or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that cannot be assigned an independent meaning and grammatical function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from another.
English also has a number of so-called ergative verbs, where the object of the verb when transitive is equivalent to the subject of the verb when intransitive. When English nominalizes a clause, the underlying subject of an intransitive verb and the underlying object of a transitive verb are both marked with the possessive case or with the ...
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the more active argument ...
In linguistics, grammatical number is a feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). [1] English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural. Some languages also have a dual, trial and paucal number or other arrangements.
For example, the English verbs arrive and run differ in their lexical aspect since the former describes an event which has a natural endpoint while the latter does not. Lexical aspect differs from grammatical aspect in that it is an inherent semantic property of a predicate , while grammatical aspect is a syntactic or morphological property.
[1] [2] An example for a word sense is 'ado' in 'much ado'. An example for a phrase is ' in point ' (relevant), which is retained in the larger phrases ' case in point ' (also 'case on point' in the legal context) and ' in point of fact ', but is rarely used outside of a legal context.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
The first defines them as opposites, such that a statement cannot be both a simile and a metaphor — if it uses a comparison word such as "like" then it is a simile; if not, it is a metaphor. [ 1 ] [ 3 ] [ 2 ] [ 4 ] The second school considers metaphor to be the broader category, in which similes are a subcategory — according to which every ...