Object (grammar)In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but are not limited to direct objects, indirect objects, and arguments of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions); the latter are more accurately termed oblique arguments, thus including other arguments not covered by core grammatical roles, such as those governed by case morphology (as in languages such as Latin) or relational nouns (as is typical for members of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area).
S-algolS-algol (St Andrews Algol) is a computer programming language derivative of ALGOL 60 developed at the University of St Andrews in 1979 by Ron Morrison and Tony Davie. The language is a modification of ALGOL to contain orthogonal data types that Morrison created for his PhD thesis. Morrison would go on to become professor at the university and head of the department of computer science. The S-algol language was used for teaching at the university at an undergraduate level until 1999.
Subject–object–verb word orderIn linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam beer drank" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam drank beer" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really have agents instead of subjects.
Constant (computer programming)In computer programming, a constant is a value that should not be altered by the program during normal execution, i.e., the value is constant. When associated with an identifier, a constant is said to be "named," although the terms "constant" and "named constant" are often used interchangeably. This is contrasted with a variable, which is an identifier with a value that can be changed during normal execution, i.e., the value is variable.
Instruction path lengthIn computer performance, the instruction path length is the number of machine code instructions required to execute a section of a computer program. The total path length for the entire program could be deemed a measure of the algorithm's performance on a particular computer hardware. The path length of a simple conditional instruction would normally be considered as equal to 2, one instruction to perform the comparison and another to take a branch if the particular condition is satisfied.
Pumping lemma for context-free languagesIn computer science, in particular in formal language theory, the pumping lemma for context-free languages, also known as the Bar-Hillel lemma, is a lemma that gives a property shared by all context-free languages and generalizes the pumping lemma for regular languages. The pumping lemma can be used to construct a proof by contradiction that a specific language is not context-free. Conversely, the pumping lemma does not suffice to guarantee that a language is context-free; there are other necessary conditions, such as Ogden's lemma, or the Interchange lemma.
CausativeIn linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O. All languages have ways to express causation but differ in the means. Most, if not all, languages have specific or lexical causative forms (such as English rise → raise, lie → lay, sit → set).
Morphosyntactic alignmentIn 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 of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the object distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all.
