Concept
Word order
Related concepts (39)
Yes–no question
In linguistics, a yes–no question, also known as a binary question, a polar question, or a general question, is a question whose expected answer is one of two choices, one that provides an affirmative answer to the question versus one that provides a negative answer to the question. Typically, in English, the choices are either "yes" or "no". Yes–no questions present an exclusive disjunction, namely a pair of alternatives of which only one is a felicitous answer.
Marker (linguistics)
In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur as clitics or inflectional affixes. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not the case. For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the word amō ("I love") is marked by suffix -ō for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense.
Transitivity (grammar)
In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take objects and how many such objects a verb can take. It is closely related to valency, which considers other verb arguments in addition to direct objects. The obligatory noun phrases and prepositional phrases determine how many arguments a predicate has. Obligatory elements are considered arguments while optional ones are never counted in the list of arguments.
Focus (linguistics)
In linguistics, focus (abbreviated ) is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill.
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca.
Inalienable possession
In linguistics, inalienable possession (abbreviated ) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alienated" from their possessor. Inalienable nouns include body parts (such as leg, which is necessarily "someone's leg" even if it is severed from the body), kinship terms (such as mother), and part-whole relations (such as top).
Differential object marking
In linguistics, differential object marking (DOM) is the phenomenon in which certain objects of verbs are marked to reflect various syntactic and semantic factors. One form of the more general phenomenon of differential argument marking, DOM is present in more than 300 languages. The term "differential object marking" was coined by Georg Bossong. In languages where DOM is active, direct objects are partitioned into two classes; in most such DOM languages, only the members of one of the classes receive a marker (the others being unmarked), but in some languages, like Finnish, objects of both classes are marked (with different endings).
Patient (grammar)
In linguistics, a grammatical patient, also called the target or undergoer, is the participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out or the thematic relation such a participant has with an action. Sometimes, theme and patient are used to mean the same thing. When used to mean different things, patient describes a receiver that changes state ("I crushed the car") and theme describes something that does not change state ("I have the car"). By that definition, stative verbs act on themes, and dynamic verbs act on patients.
Small clause
In linguistics, a small clause consists of a subject and its predicate, but lacks an overt expression of tense. Small clauses have the semantic subject-predicate characteristics of a clause, and have some, but not all, the properties of a constituent. Structural analyses of small clauses vary according to whether a flat or layered analysis is pursued. The small clause is related to the phenomena of raising-to-object, exceptional case-marking, accusativus cum infinitivo, and object control.