Comparison (grammar)Comparison is a feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages whereby adjectives and adverbs are rendered in an inflected or periphrastic way to indicate a comparative degree, property, quality, or quantity of a corresponding word, phrase, or clause. A superlative construction expresses the greatest quality, quantity, or degree relative to all other comparators. The associated is degree of comparison.
ReduplicationIn linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edward Sapir's: "generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance." Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc.
Personal pronounPersonal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as I), second person (as you), or third person (as he, she, it, they). Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number (usually singular or plural), grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects (as the English personal pronoun it usually does).
SuffixIn linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional endings) or lexical information (derivational/lexical suffixes). Inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its . Derivational suffixes fall into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation.
Ancient GreekAncient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (1400–1200 BC), Dark Ages (1200–800 BC), the Archaic or Epic period (800–500 BC), and the Classical period (500–300 BC). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers.
Slavic languagesThe Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Early Middle Ages, which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language, linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family.
Uralic languagesThe Uralic languages (jʊəˈrælᵻk; sometimes called Uralian languages jʊəˈreiliən) form a language family of 38 languages spoken natively by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Europe (over 99% of the family's speakers) and northern Asia (less than 1%). The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for nearly 60% of speakers), Finnish, and Estonian. Other significant languages with fewer speakers are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, Sami, Komi, and Vepsian, all of which are spoken in northern regions of Scandinavia and the Russian Federation.
Plurale tantumA plurale tantum; ) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. In a less strict usage of the term, it can also refer to nouns whose singular form is rarely used. In English, pluralia tantum are often words that denote objects that occur or function as pairs or sets, such as spectacles, trousers, pants, scissors, clothes, or genitals. Other examples are for collections that, like alms and feces, cannot conceivably be singular.
Classifier (linguistics)A classifier (abbreviated or ) is a word or affix that accompanies nouns and can be considered to "classify" a noun depending on the type of its referent. It is also sometimes called a measure word or counter word. Classifiers play an important role in certain languages, especially East Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Classifiers are absent or marginal in European languages. An example of a possible classifier in English is piece in phrases like "three pieces of paper".
SynesisIn linguistics, synesis () is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term referring to agreement (the change of a word form based on words relating to it) due to meaning. A constructio kata synesin (constructio ad sensum) is a grammatical construction in which a word takes the gender or number not of the word with which it should regularly agree, but of some other word implied in that word. It is effectively an agreement of words with the sense, instead of the morphosyntactic form, a type of form-meaning mismatch.
