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English Auxiliary Verbs
English auxiliary verbs are a small set of English verbs, which include the English modal auxiliary verbs and a few others. Although the Auxiliary verb, auxiliary verbs of English are widely believed to lack inherent semantic meaning and instead to modify the meaning of the verbs they accompany, they are nowadays classed by linguists as auxiliary on the basis not of semantic but of grammatical properties: among these, that they subject–auxiliary inversion, invert with their subjects in interrogative main clauses (''Has John arrived?'') and are negation (grammar), negated either by the simple addition of ''not'' (''He has not arrived'') or (with a very few exceptions) by negative inflection (''He hasn't arrived''). History of the concept When describing English, the adjective ''auxiliary'' was "formerly applied to any formative or subordinate elements of language, e.g. prefixes, English prepositions, prepositions." As applied to verbs, its conception was originally rather vag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Verbs
Verbs constitute one of the main Part of speech, parts of speech (word classes) in the English language. Like other types of words in the language, English verbs are not heavily inflection, inflected. Most combinations of Grammatical tense, tense, Grammatical aspect, aspect, Grammatical mood, mood and Grammatical voice, voice are expressed periphrasis, periphrastically, using constructions with auxiliary verbs. Generally, the only inflected forms of an English verb are a third person singular present tense form ending in ''-s'', a past tense (also called preterite), a past participle (which may be the same as the past tense), and a form ending in ''-ing'' that serves as a present participle and gerund. Most verbs inflect in a simple regular verb, regular fashion, although there are about 200 English irregular verbs, irregular verbs; the irregularity in nearly all cases concerns the past tense and past participle forms. The copula (linguistics), copula verb ''be'' has a larger numb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Comprehensive Grammar Of The English Language
''A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language'' is a descriptive grammar of English written by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. It was first published by Longman in 1985. In 1991, it was called "The greatest of contemporary grammars, because it is the most thorough and detailed we have," and "It is a grammar that transcends national boundaries." The book relies on elicitation experiments as well as three corpora: a corpus from the Survey of English Usage, the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (UK English), and the Brown Corpus (US English). Reviews In 1988, Rodney Huddleston published a very critical review. He wrote: ere are some respects in which it is seriously flawed and disappointing. A number of quite basic categories and concepts do not seem to have been thought through with sufficient care; this results in a remarkable amount of unclarity and inconsistency in the analysis, and in the organization of the grammar. * See also * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Percent Sign
The percent sign (sometimes per cent sign in British English) is the symbol used to indicate a percentage, a number or ratio as a fraction (mathematics), fraction of 100. Related signs include the permille (per thousand) sign and the Basis point#Permyriad, permyriad (per ten thousand) sign (also known as a basis point), which indicate that a number is divided by one thousand or ten thousand, respectively. Higher proportions use parts-per notation. Correct style Form and spacing English style guides prescribe writing the percent sign following the number without any space between (e.g. 50%). However, the International System of Units and ISO 31-0 standard prescribe a space between the number and percent sign, in line with the general practice of using a non-breaking space between a numerical value and its corresponding unit of measurement. Other languages have other rules for spacing in front of the percent sign: * In Czech language, Czech and in Slovak language, S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Question Mark
The question mark (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation, punctuation mark that indicates a question or interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. History The history of the question mark is contested. One popular theory posits that the shape of the symbol is inspired by the crook in a cat's tail, often attributed to the ancient Egyptians. However, Egyption hieroglyphics did not utilize punctuation marks. In the fifth century, Classical Syriac, Syriac Bible manuscripts used question markers, according to a 2011 theory by manuscript specialist Chip Coakley: he believes the ''zagwa elaya'' ("upper pair"), a vertical double dot over a word at the start of a sentence, indicates that the sentence is a question. From around 783, in Godescalc Evangelistary, a mark described as "a lightning flash, striking from right to left" is attested. This mark is later called a . According to some palaeography, paleographers, it may have indi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asterisk
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , , "little star", is a Typography, typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star (heraldry), heraldic star. Computer scientists and Mathematician, mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in ''the A* search algorithm'' or ''C*-algebra''). An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in printing, print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words. In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointer (computer programming), pointers, repetition, or multiplication. History The asterisk was already in use as a symbol in ice age Cave painting, cave paintings. There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the , , which he used when proofreading Homeri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Negative Polarity Item
In grammar and linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG. The linguistic environment in which a polarity item appears is a licensing context. In the simplest case, an affirmative statement provides a licensing context for a PPI, while negation provides a licensing context for an NPI. However, there are many complications, and not all polarity items of a particular type have the same licensing contexts. In English As examples of polarity items, consider the English lexical items ''somewhat'' and ''at all'', as used in the following sentences: # I liked the film somewhat. # I didn't like the film at all. # *I liked the film at all. # *I didn't like the film somewhat. As can be seen, ''somewhat'' is licensed by the affirmative environment of sentence (1), but it is forbidden (anti-licensed) by th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copula (linguistics)
In linguistics, a copula (; : copulas or copulae; abbreviated ) is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word ''is'' in the sentence "The sky is blue" or the phrase ''was not being'' in the sentence "It was not being cooperative." The word ''copula'' derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things. A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case. A verb that is a copula is sometimes called a copulative or copular verb. In English primary education grammar courses, a copula is often called a linking verb. In other languages, copulas show more resemblances to pronouns, as in Classical Chinese and Guarani, or may take the form of suffixes attached to a noun, as in Korean, Beja, and Inuit languages. Most languages have one main copula (in English, the verb "to be"), although some (such as Spanish, Portuguese and Thai) have more than one, while ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Synonym
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are all synonyms of one another: they are ''synonymous''. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning. Words may often be synonymous in only one particular sense: for example, ''long'' and ''extended'' in the context ''long time'' or ''extended time'' are synonymous, but ''long'' cannot be used in the phrase ''extended family''. Synonyms with exactly the same meaning share a seme or denotational sememe, whereas those with inexactly similar meanings share a broader denotational or connotational sememe and thus overlap within a semantic field. The former are sometimes called cognitive synonyms and the latter, near-synonyms, plesionyms or poecilonyms. Lexic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unstressed Contracted
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in tone. The terms ''stress'' and ''accent'' are often used synonymously in that context but are sometimes distinguished. For example, when emphasis is produced through pitch alone, it is called ''pitch accent'', and when produced through length alone, it is called ''quantitative accent''. When caused by a combination of various intensified properties, it is called ''stress accent'' or ''dynamic accent''; English uses what is called ''variable stress accent''. Since stress can be realised through a wide range of phonetic properties, such as loudness, vowel length, and pitch (which are also used for other linguistic functions), it is difficult to define stress ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inflection
In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, tense, grammatical case, case, grammatical voice, voice, grammatical aspect, aspect, grammatical person, person, grammatical number, number, grammatical gender, gender, grammatical mood, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called ''grammatical conjugation, conjugation'', while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called ''declension''. An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix, and transfix), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ', meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix ', expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voice (grammar)
In grammar, the voice (aka diathesis) of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments (subject, object, etc.). When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, the verb is said to be in the passive voice. When the subject both performs and receives the action expressed by the verb, the verb is in the middle voice. The following pair of examples illustrates the contrast between active and passive voice in English. In sentence (1), the verb form ''ate'' is in the active voice, but in sentence (2), the verb form ''was eaten'' is in the passive voice. Independent of voice, ''the cat'' is the Agent (the doer) of the action of eating in both sentences. # ''The cat ate the mouse.'' # ''The mouse was eaten by the cat.'' In a transformation from an active-voice clause to an equivalent passi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used for signaling modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying (for example, a statement of fact, of desire, of command, etc.). The term is also used more broadly to describe the syntactic expression of modality – that is, the use of verb phrases that do not involve inflection of the verb itself. Mood is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although the same word patterns are used for expressing more than one of these meanings at the same time in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages. (See tense–aspect–mood for a discussion of this.) Some examples of moods are indicative, interrogative, imperative, subjunctive, injunctive, optative, and potential. These are all finite forms of the verb. Infinitives, gerunds, and participles, which are non-finite forms ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
