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Presentative (grammar)
A presentative, or presentational, is a word or a syntactic structure which presents, or introduces, an entity, bringing it to the attention of the addressee. Typically, the entity thus introduced will serve as the topic of the subsequent discourse. For example, the construction with "there" in the following English sentence is a presentative: ''There appeared a cat on the window sill.'' In French, one of major uses of the words ''voici'' and ''voilà'' is presentative, as in the following example: However, the most common presentative in French is the ''(il) y a'' formula (from verb ''avoir'' ‘have’), as in the following sentence: Similarly to French ''il y a'', in Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ... the existential verb ''yǒu'' (have) is often ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Topic (grammar)
In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases the boundary between them depends on which specific grammatical theory is being used to analyze the sentence. The topic of a sentence is distinct from the grammatical subject. The topic is defined by pragmatic considerations, that is, the context that provides meaning. The grammatical subject is defined by syntax. In any given sentence the topic and grammatical subject may be the same, but they need not be. For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog" but the topic is "the little girl". Topic being what is being talked about and the subject being what is doing the action can, also, be distinct concepts fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Grammar
French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages. French is a moderately inflected language. Nouns and most pronouns are inflected for number (singular or plural, though in most nouns the plural is pronounced the same as the singular even if spelled differently); adjectives, for number and gender (masculine or feminine) of their nouns; personal pronouns and a few other pronouns, for person, number, gender, and case; and verbs, for tense, aspect, mood, and the person and number of their subjects. Case is primarily marked using word order and prepositions, while certain verb features are marked using auxiliary verbs. Verbs Verbs in French are conjugated to reflect the following information: * a mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, or conditional) * a tense (past, present, or future, though not all tenses can be combined with all m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Language
French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-Romance, a descendant of the Latin spoken in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien language, Francien) largely supplanted. It was also substratum (linguistics), influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul and by the Germanic languages, Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Franks, Frankish invaders. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, it was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole, were established. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Fra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Language
Chinese ( or ) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and List of ethnic groups in China, many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic languages, Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a Language family, family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin with 66%, or around 800&nb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maybrat Language
Maybrat is a Papuan languages, Papuan language spoken in the central parts of the Bird's Head Peninsula in the Indonesian province of Southwest Papua. Maybrat is also known as Ayamaru, after the name of its principal dialect, while the divergent Karon Dori dialect has sometimes been counted as a separate language. Maybrat has not been demonstrated to be related to any other language, and so is often considered a language isolate. Nevertheless, in its grammatical structure, it has a number of features that are shared with the neighbouring languages. Maybrat is characterised by a relatively small consonant inventory and an avoidance of most types of consonant clusters. There are two Grammatical gender, genders: masculine and unmarked. Verbs and inalienable possession, inalienably possessed nouns alike take Grammatical person, person prefixes. There is an elaborate system of demonstratives (words like "this" or "that"), with encoding for distance from the speaker, specificity, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inversion (linguistics)
In linguistics, inversion is any of several grammatical constructions where two expressions switch their typical or expected order of appearance, that is, they invert. There are several types of subject-verb inversion in English: ''locative inversion'', ''directive inversion'', ''copular inversion'', and ''quotative inversion''. The most frequent type of inversion in English language, English is subject–auxiliary inversion in which an English auxiliaries, auxiliary verb changes places with its subject (grammar), subject; it often occurs in questions, such as ''Are you coming?'', with the subject ''you'' being switched with the auxiliary ''are''. In many other languages, especially those with a freer word order than that of English, inversion can take place with a variety of verbs (not just auxiliaries) and with other syntactic categories as well. When a layered phrase structure grammar, constituency-based analysis of sentence structure is used, inversion often results in the dis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Hobbit
''The Hobbit, or There and Back Again'' is a children's fantasy novel by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published in 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the '' New York Herald Tribune'' for best juvenile fiction. It is recognized as a classic in children's literature and is one of the best-selling books of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. ''The Hobbit'' is set in Middle-earth and follows home-loving Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit who joins the wizard Gandalf and the thirteen dwarves of Thorin's Company on a quest to reclaim the dwarves' home and treasure from the dragon Smaug. Bilbo's journey takes him from his peaceful rural surroundings into more sinister territory. The story is told in the form of a picaresque or episodic quest; several chapters introduce a new type of monster or threat as Bilbo progresses through the landscape. Bilbo gains a new level of maturity, c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
