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Impersonal verb. In linguistics, an impersonal verb is one that has no determinate subject. For example, in the sentence " It rains ", rain is an impersonal verb and the pronoun it corresponds to an exophoric referrent. In many languages the verb takes a third person singular inflection and often appears with an expletive subject.
Impersonal passive voice. The impersonal passive voice is a verb voice that decreases the valency of an intransitive verb (which has valency one) to zero. [ 1 ]: 77. The impersonal passive deletes the subject of an intransitive verb. In place of the verb's subject, the construction instead may include a syntactic placeholder, also called a dummy.
v. t. e. In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments and complements controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject.
Abbreviations beginning with N- (generalized glossing prefix for non-, in-, un-) are not listed separately unless they have alternative forms that are included. For example, NPSTnon-past is not listed, as it is composable from N-non- + PSTpast. This convention is grounded in the Leipzig Glossing Rules. [ 2 ]
t. e. 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.). [1] 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 ...
Defective verb. In linguistics, a defective verb is a verb that either lacks a conjugated form or entails incomplete conjugation, and thus cannot be conjugated for certain grammatical tenses, aspects, persons, genders, or moods that the majority of verbs or a "normal" or regular verb in a particular language can be conjugated for [citation ...
Indirect speech. In linguistics, speech or indirect discourse is a grammatical mechanism for reporting the content of another utterance without directly quoting it. For example, the English sentence Jill said she was coming is indirect discourse while Jill said "I'm coming" would be direct discourse. In fiction, the "utterance" might amount to ...
Avalency. In linguistics and grammar, Avalency refers to the property of a predicate, often a verb, taking no arguments. Valency refers to how many and what kinds of arguments a predicate licenses —i.e. what arguments the predicate selects grammatically. [1] Avalent verbs are verbs which have no valency, meaning that they have no logical ...