A grammatical category is a semantic distinction which is reflected in a morphological paradigms. Grammatical categories can have one or more exponents. For instance, the feature [number] has the exponents [singular] and [plural]. The members of one category are mutually exclusive; a noun cannot be marked for singular and plural at the same time, nor can a verb be marked for present and past at the same time. Exponents of grammatical categories are often expressed in the same position or 'slot' (prefix, suffix, enclitic, etc.). An examples for this are the Latin cases, which are all suffixal: rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rosaa. ("rose", in nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative)
For example, in English, the grammatical number of a noun such as bird in:
* The bird is singing.
* The bird-s are singing.
is either singular or plural, which is expressed overtly by the absence or presence of the suffix -s. Furthermore, the grammatical number is reflected in verb agreement, where the singular number triggers is, and the plural number, are.
Grammatical categories are often expressed by affixes, but clitics and particles are also common.
A. ANIMACY
Animacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun is. Animacy can have various effects on the grammar of a language, such as word order, case endings, or the form a verb takes when it is associated with that noun.
In languages which demonstrate animacy, some have simple systems where nouns are either animate (e.g. people, animals) or inanimate (e.g. buildings, trees, abstract ideas), whereas others have complex hierarchical systems. In such a system, personal pronouns generally have the highest animacy (with the first person being highest among them), followed by other humans, animals, plants, natural forces such as wind, concrete objects, and abstractions, in that order. However, it is impossible to generalise completely, and different languages with animacy hierarchies could rank nouns in very different ways. For example, deities, spirits, or certain types of plant or animal could be ranked very highly because of spiritual beliefs.
B. ASPECT
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect (sometimes called viewpoint aspect) of a verb defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in the described event or state. In English, for example, the past-tense sentences "I swam" and "I was swimming" differ in aspect (the first sentence is in what is called the perfective or completive aspect, and the second in what is called the imperfective or durative aspect). The related concept of tense or the temporal situation indicated by an utterance, is typically distinguished from aspect.
Aspect, as discussed here, is a formal property of a language. Some languages distinguish different aspects through overt inflections or words that serve as aspect markers, while others, such as English, have no overt marking of aspect. For example, the K'iche' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completive aspect;[1][2] Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le, -zhe, and -guo to mark the perfective, durative, and experiential aspects,[3] and also marks aspect with adverbs;[4] and English does not have overt marking for most aspects.[citation needed] Even languages that do not mark aspect formally, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs, phrases, serial verb constructions or other means; for example, English can mark progressive aspect through the use of the progressive tense (adding be before a verb and affixing -ing to the end of the verb).[5]
Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspect or aktionsart, which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the event that the verb describes, whereas grammatical aspect is more often determined by inflectional morphology, aspect markers, or adverbs and other syntactic constructions.
Grammatical aspect may have been first dealt with in the work of the Indian linguist Yaska (ca. 7th century BCE), who distinguishes actions that are processes (bhāva), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole (mūrta). This is of course the key distinction between the imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applies this distinction between a verb and an action nominal.
According to one prevalent account, the English tense system has only two basic tenses, present and past. No primitive future tense exists in English; the futurity of an event is expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall", by use of a present form, as in "tomorrow we go to Newark", or by some other means. Present and past, in contrast, can be expressed using direct modifications of the verb, which may be modified further by the progressive aspect (also called the continuous aspect), the perfect aspect (also called the completed aspect), or both. Each tense is named according to its combination of aspects and time. These two aspects are also referred to as BE + ING (for the first) and as HAVE +EN (for the second). Although a little unwieldy, such tags allow us to avoid the suggestion that uses of the aspect BE + ING always have a "progressive" or "continuous" meaning, which they do not.
For the present tense:
* Present Simple (not progressive/continuous, not perfect; simple): "I eat"
* Present Progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I am eating"
* Present Perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten"
* Present Perfect Progressive (progressive, perfect): "I have been eating"
For the past tense:
* Past Simple (not progressive/continuous, not perfect; simple): "I ate"
* Past Progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I was eating"
* Past Perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I had eaten"
* Past Perfect Progressive (progressive, perfect): "I had been eating"
(Note that, while many elementary discussions of English grammar would classify the Present Perfect as a past tense, from the standpoint of strict linguistics – and that elucidated here – it is clearly a species of the present, as we cannot say of someone now deceased that he "has eaten" or "has been eating"; the present auxiliary implies that he is in some way present (alive), even if the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).)
The uses of these two aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker:
I was walking down the road when I met Michael Jackson's lawyer. (Speaker viewpoint in middle of action)
I have travelled widely, but I have never been to Moscow. (Speaker viewpoint at end of action)
But they can have other meanings:
You are being stupid now. (You are doing it deliberately)
You are not having chocolate with your sausages! (I forbid it)
I am having lunch with Mike tomorrow. (It is decided)
Another aspect that does survive in English, but that is no longer productive, is the frequentative, which conveys the sense of continuously repeated action; while prominent in Latin, it is omitted from most discussions of English grammar, as it suggests itself only by Scandinavian suffixes no longer heard independently from the words to which they are affixed (e.g., "blabber" for "blab", "chatter" for "chat", "dribble" for "drip", "crackle" for "crack", etc.).
Note that the aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as Hawaiian Creole English and African-American Vernacular English, are quite different from standard English, and often distinguish aspect at the expense of tense.
C. CASE
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. While most languages distinguish cases in some fashion, it is only customary to say that a language has cases when these are codified in the morphology of its nouns — that is, when nouns change their form to reflect their case. (Such a change in form is a kind of declension, hence a kind of inflection.) Cases are related to, but distinct from, thematic roles such as agent and patient; while certain cases in each language tend to correspond to certain thematic roles, cases are a syntactic notion whereas thematic roles are a semantic one.
Cases are not very prominent in modern English, except in its personal pronouns (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, case is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the clitic -'s.
Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases: the nominative case (such subjective pronouns as I, he, she, we), used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula; the accusative/dative case (such objective pronouns as me, him, her, us), used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, and sometimes for the complement of a copula; and the genitive case (such possessive pronouns as my/mine, his, her(s), our(s)), used for a grammatical possessor. That said, these pronouns often have more than three forms; the possessive typically has both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a distinct independent form (such as mine, ours). Additionally, except for the interrogative personal pronoun who, they all have a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves).
D. CLUSIVITY
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we". Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee (that is, one of the words for "we" means "you and I"), while exclusive "we" specifically excludes them (that is, another word for "we" means "he/she and I"), regardless of who else may be involved.
Clusivity is a common feature among Australian and Austronesian languages, and is also found in eastern, southern, and southwestern Asia, America, and in some creole languages. No European language makes this distinction grammatically, but some constructions may be semantically inclusive or exclusive.
E. DEFINITENESS
In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and entities which are not (indefinite noun phrases).
There is considerable variation in the expression of definiteness across languages: some languages use a definite article (which can be a free form, a phrasal clitic, or an affix on the noun) to mark a definite noun phrase. Examples are:
* Phrasal clitic: as in Basque: Cf. emakume ("woman"), emakume-a (woman-ART: "the woman"), emakume ederr-a (woman beautiful-ART: "the beautiful woman")
* Noun affix: as in Romanian: om ("man"), om-ul (man-ART: "the man"); om-ul bun (man-ART good: "the good man")
* Prefix on both noun and adjective: Arabic الكتاب الكبير (al-kitāb al-kabīr) with two instances of al- (DEF-book-DEF-big, literally, "the book the big")
* Distinct verbal forms: as in Hungarian: olvasok egy könyvet (read-1sg.pres.INDEF a book-ACC.sg: "I read a book") versus olvasom a könyvet (read-1sg.pres.DEF the book-ACC.sg: "I read the book")
Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Semitic, and auxiliary languages generally have a definite article, sometimes used as a postposition. Many other languages do not. Some examples are Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, and the Slavic languages except Bulgarian and Macedonian. When necessary, languages of this kind may indicate definiteness by other means such as Demonstratives.
It is common for definiteness to interact with the marking of case in certain syntactic contexts. In many languages direct objects (DOs) receive distinctive marking only if they are definite. For example in Turkish, the DO in the sentence adamları gördüm (meaning "I saw the men") is marked with the suffix -ı (indicating definiteness). The absence of the suffix means that the DO is indefinite ("I saw men").
In Serbo-Croatian, and to a lesser extent in Slovene, definiteness can be expressed morphologically on prenominal adjectives. The short form of the adjective is interpreted as indefinite (nov grad "a new city"), while the long form is definite and/or specific (novi grad "the new city, a certain new city").
In Japanese, a language which indicates noun functions with postpositions, the topic marker (wa) may include definiteness. For example, 馬は (uma wa) can mean "the horse", while 馬が (uma ga) can mean "a horse".
In some languages, the definiteness of the object affects the transitivity of the verb. In the absence of peculiar specificity marking, it also tends to affect the telicity of monooccasional predications.
F. DEGREE OF COMPARISON
In English grammar the degree of comparison of an adjective or adverb describes the relational value of one thing with something in another clause of a sentence. An adjective may simply describe a quality, (the positive); it may compare the quality with that of another of its kind (comparative degree); and it may compare the quality with many or all others (superlative degree).[1][2] In other languages it may describe a very large degree of a particular quality (in Semitic linguistics, called an elative).
The degree of comparison may be expressed morphologically, or syntactically. In English, for example, most monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives have morphological degrees of comparison: green (positive), greener (comparative), greenest (superlative); pretty, prettier, prettiest; while most polysyllabic adjectives use syntax: complex, more complex, most complex.
1. The positive degree is the most basic form of the adjective, positive because it does not relate to any superior or inferior qualities of other things in speech.
2. The comparative degree denotes a greater amount of a quality relative to something else. The phrase “Anna is taller than her father” means that Anna's degree of tallness is greater than her father's degree of tallness.
3. The superlative degree denotes the most, the largest, etc., by which it differs from other things.
G. EVIDENTIALITY
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement, that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particular grammatical element (affix, clitic, or particle) that indicates evidentiality. Languages with only a single evidential have had the terms mediative, médiatif, médiaphorique, and indirective used instead of evidential.
All languages have some means of specifying the source of information. European languages (such as Germanic and Romance languages) often indicate evidential-type information through modal verbs (French: devoir, Dutch: zouden, Template:Lang-dk, German: sollen) or other lexical words (adverbials) (English: reportedly) or phrases (English: it seems to me).
Some languages have a distinct grammatical category of evidentiality that is required to be expressed at all times. The elements in European languages indicating the information source are optional and usually do not indicate evidentiality as their primary function — thus they do not form a grammatical category. The obligatory elements of grammatical evidentiality systems may be translated into English, variously, as I hear that, I see that, I think that, as I hear, as I can see, as far as I understand, they say, it is said, it seems, it seems to me that, it looks like, it appears that, it turns out that, alleged, stated, allegedly, reportedly, obviously, etc.
Alexandra Aikhenvald (2004) reports that about a quarter of the world's languages have some type of grammatical evidentiality. She also reports that, to her knowledge, no research has been conducted on grammatical evidentiality in sign languages. A first preliminary study on evidentiality in sign language has been conducted by Laura Mazzoni on LIS (Italian Sign Language).
Many languages with grammatical evidentiality mark evidentiality independently from tense-aspect or epistemic modality (which is the speaker's evaluation of the information, i.e. whether it is reliable, uncertain, probable).
Grammatical evidentiality may be expressed in different forms (depending on the language), such as through affixes, clitics, or particles. For example, Eastern Pomo has 4 evidential suffixes that are added to verbs, -ink’e (nonvisual sensory), -ine (inferential), -·le (hearsay), -ya (direct knowledge).
H. FOCUS
Focus is a concept in linguistic theory that deals with how information in one phrase relates to information that has come before. Focus has been analyzed in a variety of ways by linguists. Historically, there have been two main approaches to focus – the generative approach and the functional approach. In the generative approach, the term focus is used to refer to words or expressions that are either prosodically or syntactically prominent, generally because they introduce “new” information. In the functional approach, the term focus is used to refer to words or expressions that establish coherence in the text or conversation. Although most articles in linguistic theory on focus are devoted to its effects in English, there is also extensive research on focus not only in topic-prominent languages such as Korean and Japanese, but also in languages such as Hungarian, Italian and Russian.
1. Generative Approaches
In generative linguistics, focus determines which part of the sentence contributes new or “textually and situationally non-derivable information
Standard generative approaches to grammar argue that phonology and semantics cannot exchange information directly (See Fig. 1). Therefore, syntactic mechanisms including features and transformations include prosodic information regarding focus that is passed to the semantics and phonology.
Fig. 1 The Y-Model of Syntax, Semantics and Phonology
Focus may be highlighted either prosodically or syntactically or both, depending on the language. In syntax this can be done assigning focus markers, as shown in (1), or by preposing as shown in (2):
(1) I saw [JOHN] f.
(2) [JOHN] f, I saw.
In (1), focus is marked syntactically with the subscripted ‘f’ which is realized phonologically by a nuclear pitch accent. Clefting induces an obligatory intonation break. Therefore in (2), focus is marked via word order and a nuclear pitch accent.
Focus also relates to phonology and has ramifications for how and where suprasegmental information such as rhythm, stress, and intonation is encoded in the grammar, and in particular intonational tunes which mark focus [2]. Speakers can use pitch accents on syllables to indicate what word(s) are in focus. New words are often accented while given words are not. The accented word(s) forms the focus domain. However, not all of the words in a focus domain need be accented. The focus domain can be either broad, as shown in (3), or narrow, as shown in (4) and (5):
(3) Did you see a grey dog or a cat? I saw [a grey DOG] f.
(4) Did you see a grey dog or a grey cat? I saw a grey [DOG] f.
(5) Did you see a grey dog or a black dog? I saw a [GREY] f dog.
The question/answer paradigm shown in (3) – (5) has been utilized by a variety of theorists to illustrate the range of contexts a sentence containing focus can be used felicitously. Specifically, the question/answer paradigm has been used as a diagnostic for what counts as new information. For example, the focus pattern in (3) would be infelicitous if the question was ‘Did you see a grey dog or a black dog?’.
In (3) and (4), the pitch accent is marked in bold. In (3), the pitch accent is placed on dog but the entire noun phrase a grey dog is under focus. In (4), the pitch accent is also placed on dog but only the noun dog is under focus. In (5), pitch accent is placed on grey and only the adjective grey is under focus.
Historically, generative proposals made focus a feature bound to a single word within a sentence. Chomsky & Halle formulated a Nuclear Stress Rule that proposed there to be a relation between the main stress of a sentence and a single constituent. Since this constituent is prominent sententially in a way that can contrast with lexical stress, this was originally referred to as "nuclear" stress. The purpose of this rule was to capture the intuition that within each sentence, there is one word in particular that is accented more prominently due to its importance - this is said to form the nucleus of that sentence.
Focus was later suggested to be a structural position at the beginning of the sentence (or on the left periphery) in Romance languages such as Italian, as the lexical head of a Focus Phrase (or FP, following the X-bar theory of phrase structure). Jackendoff, Selkrik, Rooth, Krifka, Schwarzschildargue that focus consists of a feature that is assigned to a node in the syntactic representation of a sentence. Because focus is now widely seen as corresponding between heavy stress, or nuclear pitch accent, this feature is often associated with the phonologically prominent element(s) of a sentence.
Sound structure (phonological and phonetic) studies of focus are not as numerous, as relational language phenomena tend to be of greater interest to syntacticians and semanticists. But this may be changing: a recent study found that not only do focused words and phrases have a higher range of pitch compared to words in the same sentence but that words following the focus in both American English and Mandarin Chinese were lower than normal in pitch and words before a focus are unaffected. The precise usages of focus in natural language are still uncertain. A continuum of possibilities could possibly be defined between precisely enunciated and staccato styles of speech based on variations in pragmatics or timing.
Currently, there are two central themes in research on focus in generative linguistics. First, given what words or expressions are prominent, what is the meaning of some sentence? Rooth, Jacobs, Krifka, and von Stechowclaim that there are lexical items and construction specific-rules that refer directly to the notion of focus.
2. Prominence and Meaning
Focus directly affects the semantics, or meaning, of a sentence. Different ways of pronouncing the sentence affects the meaning, or, what the speaker intends to convey. Focus distinguishes one interpretation of a sentence from other interpretations of the same sentence that do not differ in word order, but may differ in the way in which the words are taken to relate to each other. To see the effects of focus on meaning, consider the following examples:
(6) John only introduced Bill to SUE.
In (6), accent is placed on Sue. There are two readings of (6) - broad focus shown in (7) and narrow focus shown in (8):
(7) John only [introduced Bill to SUE] f.
(8) John only introduced Bill to [SUE] f.
The meaning of (7) can be summarized as the only thing John did is introducing Bill to Sue. The meaning of (8) can be summarized as the only person to whom John introduced Bill is Sue.
In both (7) and (8), focus is associated with the focus sensitive expression only. This is known as association with focus. The class of focus sensitive expressions in which focus can be associated with includes exclusives (only, just) non-scalar additives (merely, too) scalar additives (also, even), particularlizers (in particular, for example), intensifiers, quantificational adverbs, quantificational determiners, sentential connectives, emotives, counterfactuals, superlatives, negation and generics. It is claimed that focus operators must c-command their focus.
I. GENDER
In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once.
If a language distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, for instance, then each noun belongs to one of those two genders; in order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. The term "grammatical gender" is mostly used for Indo-European languages, many of which follow the pattern just described. While Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had grammatical gender, Modern English, however, is normally described as lacking grammatical gender.
The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language.
Although some authors use the term "noun class" as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", for others they are separate concepts. One can in fact say that grammatical gender is a type of noun class.
J. MOOD
Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive verb forms that are used to signal modality. It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar as the same word patterns are used to express more than one of these concepts at the same time.
Currently identified moods include conditional, imperative, indicative, injunctive, optative, potential, subjunctive, and more. Infinitive is a category apart from all these finite forms, and so are gerunds and participles. Some Uralic Samoyedic languages have more than ten moods; Nenets has as many as sixteen. The original Indo-European inventory of moods was indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative. Not every Indo-European language has each of these moods, but the most conservative ones such as Avestan, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit have them all. Italian has replaced optative with condizionale, which is a mix of conditional and optative mood.
However, not all of the moods listed below are clearly conceptually distinct. Individual terminology varies from language to language, and the coverage of (e.g.) the "conditional" mood in one language may largely overlap with that of the "hypothetical" or "potential" mood in another. Even when two different moods exist in the same language, their respective usages may blur, or may be defined by syntactic rather than semantic criteria. For example, the subjunctive and optative moods in Ancient Greek alternate syntactically in many subordinate clauses, depending on the tense of the main verb. The usage of the indicative, subjunctive and jussive moods in Classical Arabic is almost completely controlled by syntactic context; the only possible alternation in the same context is between indicative and jussive following the negative particle lā.
The distinction of affirmative and negative is not mood but polarity.
K. NOUN CLASS
In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each (see below). Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.
1. Notion
In general, there are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:
* according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion),
* by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or
* through an arbitrary convention.
Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. The fact that a noun belongs to a given class may imply the presence of:
* agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals etc. which are noun phrase constituents,
* agreement affixes on the verb,
* a special form of a pronoun which replaces the noun,
* an affix on the noun,
* a class-specific word in the noun phrase (or in some types of noun phrases).
Modern English expresses noun classes through the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. The choice between the relative pronoun who (persons) and which (non-persons) may also be considered a way of categorizing nouns into noun classes. A few nouns also exhibit vestigial noun classes, such as actress, where the suffix -ess added to actor denotes a female person. This type of noun affixation is not very frequent in English, but quite common in languages which have the true grammatical gender, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs.
When noun class is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender.
In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers.
2. Common Criteria For Noun Classes
Common criteria that define noun classes include:
* animate vs. inanimate (as in Ojibwe)
* rational vs. non-rational (as in Tamil)
* human vs. non-human
* human vs. animal vs. inanimate
* male vs. other
* male human vs. other
* masculine vs. feminine
* masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter
* strong vs. weak
* augmentative vs. diminutive
A more or less discernible correlation between noun class and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages, even in the Indo-European family.
Some linguists think the Nostratic language, a hypothesized ancestor of Indo-European and other language families, had the noun classes "human", "animal", and "object".
L. NUMBER
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" or "more than one").
The count distinctions typically, but not always, correspond to the actual count of the referents of the marked noun or pronoun.
The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc. For that use of the term, see "Grammatical aspect".
Most languages of the world have formal means to express differences of number. The most widespread distinction, as found in English and many other languages, involves a simple two-way number contrast between singular and plural (car / cars; child / children, etc.). Other more elaborate systems of number are described below.
Grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. As an example, consider the English sentences below:
That apple on the table is fresh.
Those two apples on the table are fresh.
The number of apples is marked on the noun — "apple", singular number (one item) vs. "apples", plural number (more than one item) —, on the demonstrative, "that/those", and on the verb, "is/are". Note that, especially in the second sentence, this information can be considered redundant, since quantity is already indicated by the numeral "two".
A language has grammatical number when its nouns are subdivided into morphological classes according to the quantity they express, such that:
1. Every noun belongs to a single number class. (Number partitions nouns into disjoint classes.)
2. Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs have different forms for each number class, and must be inflected to match the number of the nouns they refer to. (Number is an agreement category.)
This is the case in English: every noun is either singular or plural (a few, such as "fish", can be either, according to context), and at least some modifiers of nouns — namely the demonstratives, the personal pronouns, the articles, and verbs — are inflected to agree with the number of the nouns they refer to: "this car" and "these cars" are correct, while "*this cars" or "*these car" are ungrammatical. Only count nouns can be freely used in the singular and in the plural. Mass nouns, like "wine", "silverware" and "wisdom", are normally used only in the singular. Many languages distinguish between count nouns and mass nouns.
Not all languages have number as a grammatical category. In those that do not, quantity must be expressed either directly, with numerals, or indirectly, through optional quantifiers. However, many of these languages compensate for the lack of grammatical number with an extensive system of measure words.
There is a hierarchy among number categories: No language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural.
M. PERSON
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event, such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs, sometimes nouns, and possessive relationships as well.
English distinguishes three grammatical persons: The personal pronouns I (singular) and we (plural) are in the first person. The personal pronoun you is the second person. It refers to the addressee. You is used in both the singular and plural; thou is the archaic informal second-person singular pronoun.
He, she, it, and they are in the third person. Any person, place, or thing other than the speaker and the addressee is referred to in the third person.
N. POLARITY
Grammatical polarity is the distinction of affirmative and negative, which indicates the truth or falsehood of a statement respectively. In English, grammatical polarity is generally indicated by the presence or absence of the modifier not, which negates the statement. Many other languages contain similar modifiers: Italian and Interlingua have non, Spanish has no, French has ne ... pas, Esperanto has ne, German has nicht, and Swedish has inte.
In many languages, rather than inflecting the verb, negation is expressed by adding a particle:
* Before the verb phrase, as in Spanish "No está en casa";
* Or after it, as in archaic and dialectal English "you remember not" or Dutch "Ik zie hem niet";
* Or both, as in French "Je ne sais pas" or Afrikaans "Hy kan nie Afrikaans praat nie".
Standard English usually adds the auxiliary verb do, and then adds not after it: "I did not go there". In these instances, "do" is known as a dummy auxiliary, because of its zero semantic content.
In Indo-European languages, it is not customary to speak of a negative mood, since in the languages negation is originally a grammatical particle that can be applied to a verb in any of these moods. Nevertheless, in some, like Welsh, verbs have special inflections to be used in negative clauses.
In other language families, the negative may count as a separate mood. An example is Japanese, which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the suffix -nai (indicating negation), e.g. tabeta ("ate") and tabenakatta ("did not eat"). It could be argued that Modern English has joined the ranks of these languages, since negation in the indicative mood requires the use of an auxiliary verb and a distinct syntax in most cases. Zwicky and Pullum have shown that n't is an inflectional suffix, not a clitic or a derivational suffix[1]. Contrast, for instance, "He sings" → "He doesn't sing" (where the dummy auxiliary do has to be supplied and inflected to doesn't) with Il chante → Il ne chante pas; French adds the (discontinuous) negative particle ne ... pas, without changing the form of the verb.
O. TENSE
Grammatical tense is a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at, during, or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs.
Tense is one of at least five qualities, along with mood, voice, aspect, and person, which verb forms may express.
Tenses cannot always be translated from one language to another. While verbs in all languages have typical forms by which they are identified and indexed in dictionaries, usually the most common present tense or an infinitive, their meanings vary among languages.
There are languages (such as isolating languages, like Chinese) in which tense is not used, but implied in temporal adverbs when needed, and some (such as Japanese) in which temporal information appears in the inflection of adjectives, lending them a verb-like quality. In some languages (such as Russian) a simple verb may indicate aspect and tense.
The number of tenses in a language may be controversial, since its verbs may indicate qualities of uncertainty, frequency, completion, duration, possibility, and even whether information derives from experience or hearsay (the last two are evidentiality).
The distinction between grammatical tense, aspect, and mood is fuzzy and at times controversial. The English continuous temporal constructions express an aspect as well as a tense, and some therefore consider that aspect to be separate from tense in English. In Spanish the traditional verb tenses are also combinations of aspectual and temporal information.
Going even further, there's an ongoing dispute among modern English grammarians (see English grammar) regarding whether tense can only refer to inflected forms. In Germanic languages there are very few tenses (often only two) formed strictly by inflection, and one school contends that all complex or periphrastic time-formations are aspects rather than tenses.
The abbreviation TAM, T/A/M or TMA is sometimes found when dealing with verbal morphemes that combine tense, aspect and mood information.
In some languages, tense and other TAM information may be marked on a noun, rather than a verb. This is called nominal TAM.
P. TOPIC
In linguistics, the topic (or theme) is the part of the content of a predicated sentence. Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. it has already been mentioned and understood. For example, the topic is emphasised in italics in the following sentences:
* The dog licked the little girl.
* The little girl was licked by the dog.
* As for the little girl, the dog licked her.
* The little girl, the dog licked her.
A distinction must be made between the sentence-level topic and the discourse-level topic. Suppose we are talking about Mike's house:
(6) Mike's house was so comfortable and warm! He really didn't want to leave, but he couldn't afford the rent, you know. And it had such a nice garden in the back!
In the example, the discourse-level topic is established in the first sentence: it is Mike's house. In the following sentence, a new "local" topic is established on the sentence level: he (Mike). But the discourse-level topic is still Mike's house, which is why the last comment does not seem out of place.
Many languages, like English, resort to different means in order to signal a new topic, such as:
* Stating it explicitly as the subject as in (1) (which tends to be considered more topic-like by the speakers).
* Using passive voice to transform an object into a subject as in (2) (for the above reason).
* Through periphrastic constructions like "As for...", "Speaking of...", etc, as in (3).
* Using topic fronting/topicalization, i. e. moving the topic to the beginning of the sentence as in (4) or using left dislocation as in (5). (The difference between the two is that in the latter case there is a resumptive pronoun, her in (5).)
There are some other languages, like Japanese or Korean, that work directly on a topic-comment frame. A new topic is always introduced in a specific way, like with a topic marker (Japanese and Korean use the suffixes wa and neun/eun, respectively). The topic can be the subject or the object of a verb, but it can also be an indirect object or even an oblique complement of any kind. It is always dislocated to the front of the sentence.
Signaling the topic as such serves the pragmatic function of avoiding repetition. In many languages, old topics are replaced with a pronoun. Pro-drop languages like Japanese tend simply to delete the old topic, which is then left implicit throughout the discourse until a new one appears.
Q. TRANSITIVITY
In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects. It is closely related to valency.
Traditional grammar makes a binary distinction between transitive verbs such as throw, injure, kiss that take a direct object, versus intransitive verbs such as fall or sit that cannot take a direct object. In practice, many languages (including English) interpret the category more flexibly: allowing, for example, ambitransitive verbs or ditransitive verbs.
In functional grammar, transitivity is considered to be a continuum rather than a binary category. The "continuum" view takes a more semantic approach, e.g. by taking into account the degree to which an action affects its object (so that the verb see is described as having "lower transitivity" than the verb kill).
R. VOICE
In grammar, the voice (also called gender or 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 actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.
For example, in the sentence:
The cat ate the mouse.
the verb "ate" is in the active voice, but in the sentence:
The mouse was eaten by the cat.
the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.
In a transformation from an active-voice clause to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject and the direct object switch grammatical roles. The direct object gets promoted to subject, and the subject demoted to an (optional) complement. In the examples above, the mouse serves as the direct object in the active-voice version, but becomes the subject in the passive version. The subject of the active-voice version, the cat, becomes part of a prepositional phrase in the passive version of the sentence, and could be left out entirely.
For example, in English, the grammatical number of a noun such as bird in:
* The bird is singing.
* The bird-s are singing.
is either singular or plural, which is expressed overtly by the absence or presence of the suffix -s. Furthermore, the grammatical number is reflected in verb agreement, where the singular number triggers is, and the plural number, are.
Grammatical categories are often expressed by affixes, but clitics and particles are also common.
A. ANIMACY
Animacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun is. Animacy can have various effects on the grammar of a language, such as word order, case endings, or the form a verb takes when it is associated with that noun.
In languages which demonstrate animacy, some have simple systems where nouns are either animate (e.g. people, animals) or inanimate (e.g. buildings, trees, abstract ideas), whereas others have complex hierarchical systems. In such a system, personal pronouns generally have the highest animacy (with the first person being highest among them), followed by other humans, animals, plants, natural forces such as wind, concrete objects, and abstractions, in that order. However, it is impossible to generalise completely, and different languages with animacy hierarchies could rank nouns in very different ways. For example, deities, spirits, or certain types of plant or animal could be ranked very highly because of spiritual beliefs.
B. ASPECT
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect (sometimes called viewpoint aspect) of a verb defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in the described event or state. In English, for example, the past-tense sentences "I swam" and "I was swimming" differ in aspect (the first sentence is in what is called the perfective or completive aspect, and the second in what is called the imperfective or durative aspect). The related concept of tense or the temporal situation indicated by an utterance, is typically distinguished from aspect.
Aspect, as discussed here, is a formal property of a language. Some languages distinguish different aspects through overt inflections or words that serve as aspect markers, while others, such as English, have no overt marking of aspect. For example, the K'iche' language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k- and x- to mark incompletive and completive aspect;[1][2] Mandarin Chinese has the aspect markers -le, -zhe, and -guo to mark the perfective, durative, and experiential aspects,[3] and also marks aspect with adverbs;[4] and English does not have overt marking for most aspects.[citation needed] Even languages that do not mark aspect formally, however, can convey such distinctions by the use of adverbs, phrases, serial verb constructions or other means; for example, English can mark progressive aspect through the use of the progressive tense (adding be before a verb and affixing -ing to the end of the verb).[5]
Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspect or aktionsart, which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the event that the verb describes, whereas grammatical aspect is more often determined by inflectional morphology, aspect markers, or adverbs and other syntactic constructions.
Grammatical aspect may have been first dealt with in the work of the Indian linguist Yaska (ca. 7th century BCE), who distinguishes actions that are processes (bhāva), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole (mūrta). This is of course the key distinction between the imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applies this distinction between a verb and an action nominal.
According to one prevalent account, the English tense system has only two basic tenses, present and past. No primitive future tense exists in English; the futurity of an event is expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall", by use of a present form, as in "tomorrow we go to Newark", or by some other means. Present and past, in contrast, can be expressed using direct modifications of the verb, which may be modified further by the progressive aspect (also called the continuous aspect), the perfect aspect (also called the completed aspect), or both. Each tense is named according to its combination of aspects and time. These two aspects are also referred to as BE + ING (for the first) and as HAVE +EN (for the second). Although a little unwieldy, such tags allow us to avoid the suggestion that uses of the aspect BE + ING always have a "progressive" or "continuous" meaning, which they do not.
For the present tense:
* Present Simple (not progressive/continuous, not perfect; simple): "I eat"
* Present Progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I am eating"
* Present Perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I have eaten"
* Present Perfect Progressive (progressive, perfect): "I have been eating"
For the past tense:
* Past Simple (not progressive/continuous, not perfect; simple): "I ate"
* Past Progressive (progressive, not perfect): "I was eating"
* Past Perfect (not progressive, perfect): "I had eaten"
* Past Perfect Progressive (progressive, perfect): "I had been eating"
(Note that, while many elementary discussions of English grammar would classify the Present Perfect as a past tense, from the standpoint of strict linguistics – and that elucidated here – it is clearly a species of the present, as we cannot say of someone now deceased that he "has eaten" or "has been eating"; the present auxiliary implies that he is in some way present (alive), even if the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).)
The uses of these two aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker:
I was walking down the road when I met Michael Jackson's lawyer. (Speaker viewpoint in middle of action)
I have travelled widely, but I have never been to Moscow. (Speaker viewpoint at end of action)
But they can have other meanings:
You are being stupid now. (You are doing it deliberately)
You are not having chocolate with your sausages! (I forbid it)
I am having lunch with Mike tomorrow. (It is decided)
Another aspect that does survive in English, but that is no longer productive, is the frequentative, which conveys the sense of continuously repeated action; while prominent in Latin, it is omitted from most discussions of English grammar, as it suggests itself only by Scandinavian suffixes no longer heard independently from the words to which they are affixed (e.g., "blabber" for "blab", "chatter" for "chat", "dribble" for "drip", "crackle" for "crack", etc.).
Note that the aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as Hawaiian Creole English and African-American Vernacular English, are quite different from standard English, and often distinguish aspect at the expense of tense.
C. CASE
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. While most languages distinguish cases in some fashion, it is only customary to say that a language has cases when these are codified in the morphology of its nouns — that is, when nouns change their form to reflect their case. (Such a change in form is a kind of declension, hence a kind of inflection.) Cases are related to, but distinct from, thematic roles such as agent and patient; while certain cases in each language tend to correspond to certain thematic roles, cases are a syntactic notion whereas thematic roles are a semantic one.
Cases are not very prominent in modern English, except in its personal pronouns (a remnant of the more extensive case system of Old English). For other pronouns, and all nouns, adjectives, and articles, case is indicated only by word order, by prepositions, and by the clitic -'s.
Taken as a whole, English personal pronouns are typically said to have three morphological cases: the nominative case (such subjective pronouns as I, he, she, we), used for the subject of a finite verb and sometimes for the complement of a copula; the accusative/dative case (such objective pronouns as me, him, her, us), used for the direct or indirect object of a verb, for the object of a preposition, for an absolute disjunct, and sometimes for the complement of a copula; and the genitive case (such possessive pronouns as my/mine, his, her(s), our(s)), used for a grammatical possessor. That said, these pronouns often have more than three forms; the possessive typically has both a determiner form (such as my, our) and a distinct independent form (such as mine, ours). Additionally, except for the interrogative personal pronoun who, they all have a distinct reflexive or intensive form (such as myself, ourselves).
D. CLUSIVITY
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we". Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee (that is, one of the words for "we" means "you and I"), while exclusive "we" specifically excludes them (that is, another word for "we" means "he/she and I"), regardless of who else may be involved.
Clusivity is a common feature among Australian and Austronesian languages, and is also found in eastern, southern, and southwestern Asia, America, and in some creole languages. No European language makes this distinction grammatically, but some constructions may be semantically inclusive or exclusive.
E. DEFINITENESS
In grammatical theory, definiteness is a feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities which are specific and identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and entities which are not (indefinite noun phrases).
There is considerable variation in the expression of definiteness across languages: some languages use a definite article (which can be a free form, a phrasal clitic, or an affix on the noun) to mark a definite noun phrase. Examples are:
* Phrasal clitic: as in Basque: Cf. emakume ("woman"), emakume-a (woman-ART: "the woman"), emakume ederr-a (woman beautiful-ART: "the beautiful woman")
* Noun affix: as in Romanian: om ("man"), om-ul (man-ART: "the man"); om-ul bun (man-ART good: "the good man")
* Prefix on both noun and adjective: Arabic الكتاب الكبير (al-kitāb al-kabīr) with two instances of al- (DEF-book-DEF-big, literally, "the book the big")
* Distinct verbal forms: as in Hungarian: olvasok egy könyvet (read-1sg.pres.INDEF a book-ACC.sg: "I read a book") versus olvasom a könyvet (read-1sg.pres.DEF the book-ACC.sg: "I read the book")
Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Semitic, and auxiliary languages generally have a definite article, sometimes used as a postposition. Many other languages do not. Some examples are Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, and the Slavic languages except Bulgarian and Macedonian. When necessary, languages of this kind may indicate definiteness by other means such as Demonstratives.
It is common for definiteness to interact with the marking of case in certain syntactic contexts. In many languages direct objects (DOs) receive distinctive marking only if they are definite. For example in Turkish, the DO in the sentence adamları gördüm (meaning "I saw the men") is marked with the suffix -ı (indicating definiteness). The absence of the suffix means that the DO is indefinite ("I saw men").
In Serbo-Croatian, and to a lesser extent in Slovene, definiteness can be expressed morphologically on prenominal adjectives. The short form of the adjective is interpreted as indefinite (nov grad "a new city"), while the long form is definite and/or specific (novi grad "the new city, a certain new city").
In Japanese, a language which indicates noun functions with postpositions, the topic marker (wa) may include definiteness. For example, 馬は (uma wa) can mean "the horse", while 馬が (uma ga) can mean "a horse".
In some languages, the definiteness of the object affects the transitivity of the verb. In the absence of peculiar specificity marking, it also tends to affect the telicity of monooccasional predications.
F. DEGREE OF COMPARISON
In English grammar the degree of comparison of an adjective or adverb describes the relational value of one thing with something in another clause of a sentence. An adjective may simply describe a quality, (the positive); it may compare the quality with that of another of its kind (comparative degree); and it may compare the quality with many or all others (superlative degree).[1][2] In other languages it may describe a very large degree of a particular quality (in Semitic linguistics, called an elative).
The degree of comparison may be expressed morphologically, or syntactically. In English, for example, most monosyllabic and some disyllabic adjectives have morphological degrees of comparison: green (positive), greener (comparative), greenest (superlative); pretty, prettier, prettiest; while most polysyllabic adjectives use syntax: complex, more complex, most complex.
1. The positive degree is the most basic form of the adjective, positive because it does not relate to any superior or inferior qualities of other things in speech.
2. The comparative degree denotes a greater amount of a quality relative to something else. The phrase “Anna is taller than her father” means that Anna's degree of tallness is greater than her father's degree of tallness.
3. The superlative degree denotes the most, the largest, etc., by which it differs from other things.
G. EVIDENTIALITY
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement, that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particular grammatical element (affix, clitic, or particle) that indicates evidentiality. Languages with only a single evidential have had the terms mediative, médiatif, médiaphorique, and indirective used instead of evidential.
All languages have some means of specifying the source of information. European languages (such as Germanic and Romance languages) often indicate evidential-type information through modal verbs (French: devoir, Dutch: zouden, Template:Lang-dk, German: sollen) or other lexical words (adverbials) (English: reportedly) or phrases (English: it seems to me).
Some languages have a distinct grammatical category of evidentiality that is required to be expressed at all times. The elements in European languages indicating the information source are optional and usually do not indicate evidentiality as their primary function — thus they do not form a grammatical category. The obligatory elements of grammatical evidentiality systems may be translated into English, variously, as I hear that, I see that, I think that, as I hear, as I can see, as far as I understand, they say, it is said, it seems, it seems to me that, it looks like, it appears that, it turns out that, alleged, stated, allegedly, reportedly, obviously, etc.
Alexandra Aikhenvald (2004) reports that about a quarter of the world's languages have some type of grammatical evidentiality. She also reports that, to her knowledge, no research has been conducted on grammatical evidentiality in sign languages. A first preliminary study on evidentiality in sign language has been conducted by Laura Mazzoni on LIS (Italian Sign Language).
Many languages with grammatical evidentiality mark evidentiality independently from tense-aspect or epistemic modality (which is the speaker's evaluation of the information, i.e. whether it is reliable, uncertain, probable).
Grammatical evidentiality may be expressed in different forms (depending on the language), such as through affixes, clitics, or particles. For example, Eastern Pomo has 4 evidential suffixes that are added to verbs, -ink’e (nonvisual sensory), -ine (inferential), -·le (hearsay), -ya (direct knowledge).
H. FOCUS
Focus is a concept in linguistic theory that deals with how information in one phrase relates to information that has come before. Focus has been analyzed in a variety of ways by linguists. Historically, there have been two main approaches to focus – the generative approach and the functional approach. In the generative approach, the term focus is used to refer to words or expressions that are either prosodically or syntactically prominent, generally because they introduce “new” information. In the functional approach, the term focus is used to refer to words or expressions that establish coherence in the text or conversation. Although most articles in linguistic theory on focus are devoted to its effects in English, there is also extensive research on focus not only in topic-prominent languages such as Korean and Japanese, but also in languages such as Hungarian, Italian and Russian.
1. Generative Approaches
In generative linguistics, focus determines which part of the sentence contributes new or “textually and situationally non-derivable information
Standard generative approaches to grammar argue that phonology and semantics cannot exchange information directly (See Fig. 1). Therefore, syntactic mechanisms including features and transformations include prosodic information regarding focus that is passed to the semantics and phonology.
Fig. 1 The Y-Model of Syntax, Semantics and Phonology
Focus may be highlighted either prosodically or syntactically or both, depending on the language. In syntax this can be done assigning focus markers, as shown in (1), or by preposing as shown in (2):
(1) I saw [JOHN] f.
(2) [JOHN] f, I saw.
In (1), focus is marked syntactically with the subscripted ‘f’ which is realized phonologically by a nuclear pitch accent. Clefting induces an obligatory intonation break. Therefore in (2), focus is marked via word order and a nuclear pitch accent.
Focus also relates to phonology and has ramifications for how and where suprasegmental information such as rhythm, stress, and intonation is encoded in the grammar, and in particular intonational tunes which mark focus [2]. Speakers can use pitch accents on syllables to indicate what word(s) are in focus. New words are often accented while given words are not. The accented word(s) forms the focus domain. However, not all of the words in a focus domain need be accented. The focus domain can be either broad, as shown in (3), or narrow, as shown in (4) and (5):
(3) Did you see a grey dog or a cat? I saw [a grey DOG] f.
(4) Did you see a grey dog or a grey cat? I saw a grey [DOG] f.
(5) Did you see a grey dog or a black dog? I saw a [GREY] f dog.
The question/answer paradigm shown in (3) – (5) has been utilized by a variety of theorists to illustrate the range of contexts a sentence containing focus can be used felicitously. Specifically, the question/answer paradigm has been used as a diagnostic for what counts as new information. For example, the focus pattern in (3) would be infelicitous if the question was ‘Did you see a grey dog or a black dog?’.
In (3) and (4), the pitch accent is marked in bold. In (3), the pitch accent is placed on dog but the entire noun phrase a grey dog is under focus. In (4), the pitch accent is also placed on dog but only the noun dog is under focus. In (5), pitch accent is placed on grey and only the adjective grey is under focus.
Historically, generative proposals made focus a feature bound to a single word within a sentence. Chomsky & Halle formulated a Nuclear Stress Rule that proposed there to be a relation between the main stress of a sentence and a single constituent. Since this constituent is prominent sententially in a way that can contrast with lexical stress, this was originally referred to as "nuclear" stress. The purpose of this rule was to capture the intuition that within each sentence, there is one word in particular that is accented more prominently due to its importance - this is said to form the nucleus of that sentence.
Focus was later suggested to be a structural position at the beginning of the sentence (or on the left periphery) in Romance languages such as Italian, as the lexical head of a Focus Phrase (or FP, following the X-bar theory of phrase structure). Jackendoff, Selkrik, Rooth, Krifka, Schwarzschildargue that focus consists of a feature that is assigned to a node in the syntactic representation of a sentence. Because focus is now widely seen as corresponding between heavy stress, or nuclear pitch accent, this feature is often associated with the phonologically prominent element(s) of a sentence.
Sound structure (phonological and phonetic) studies of focus are not as numerous, as relational language phenomena tend to be of greater interest to syntacticians and semanticists. But this may be changing: a recent study found that not only do focused words and phrases have a higher range of pitch compared to words in the same sentence but that words following the focus in both American English and Mandarin Chinese were lower than normal in pitch and words before a focus are unaffected. The precise usages of focus in natural language are still uncertain. A continuum of possibilities could possibly be defined between precisely enunciated and staccato styles of speech based on variations in pragmatics or timing.
Currently, there are two central themes in research on focus in generative linguistics. First, given what words or expressions are prominent, what is the meaning of some sentence? Rooth, Jacobs, Krifka, and von Stechowclaim that there are lexical items and construction specific-rules that refer directly to the notion of focus.
2. Prominence and Meaning
Focus directly affects the semantics, or meaning, of a sentence. Different ways of pronouncing the sentence affects the meaning, or, what the speaker intends to convey. Focus distinguishes one interpretation of a sentence from other interpretations of the same sentence that do not differ in word order, but may differ in the way in which the words are taken to relate to each other. To see the effects of focus on meaning, consider the following examples:
(6) John only introduced Bill to SUE.
In (6), accent is placed on Sue. There are two readings of (6) - broad focus shown in (7) and narrow focus shown in (8):
(7) John only [introduced Bill to SUE] f.
(8) John only introduced Bill to [SUE] f.
The meaning of (7) can be summarized as the only thing John did is introducing Bill to Sue. The meaning of (8) can be summarized as the only person to whom John introduced Bill is Sue.
In both (7) and (8), focus is associated with the focus sensitive expression only. This is known as association with focus. The class of focus sensitive expressions in which focus can be associated with includes exclusives (only, just) non-scalar additives (merely, too) scalar additives (also, even), particularlizers (in particular, for example), intensifiers, quantificational adverbs, quantificational determiners, sentential connectives, emotives, counterfactuals, superlatives, negation and generics. It is claimed that focus operators must c-command their focus.
I. GENDER
In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once.
If a language distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, for instance, then each noun belongs to one of those two genders; in order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. The term "grammatical gender" is mostly used for Indo-European languages, many of which follow the pattern just described. While Old English (Anglo-Saxon) had grammatical gender, Modern English, however, is normally described as lacking grammatical gender.
The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language.
Although some authors use the term "noun class" as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", for others they are separate concepts. One can in fact say that grammatical gender is a type of noun class.
J. MOOD
Grammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive verb forms that are used to signal modality. It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar as the same word patterns are used to express more than one of these concepts at the same time.
Currently identified moods include conditional, imperative, indicative, injunctive, optative, potential, subjunctive, and more. Infinitive is a category apart from all these finite forms, and so are gerunds and participles. Some Uralic Samoyedic languages have more than ten moods; Nenets has as many as sixteen. The original Indo-European inventory of moods was indicative, subjunctive, optative, and imperative. Not every Indo-European language has each of these moods, but the most conservative ones such as Avestan, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit have them all. Italian has replaced optative with condizionale, which is a mix of conditional and optative mood.
However, not all of the moods listed below are clearly conceptually distinct. Individual terminology varies from language to language, and the coverage of (e.g.) the "conditional" mood in one language may largely overlap with that of the "hypothetical" or "potential" mood in another. Even when two different moods exist in the same language, their respective usages may blur, or may be defined by syntactic rather than semantic criteria. For example, the subjunctive and optative moods in Ancient Greek alternate syntactically in many subordinate clauses, depending on the tense of the main verb. The usage of the indicative, subjunctive and jussive moods in Classical Arabic is almost completely controlled by syntactic context; the only possible alternation in the same context is between indicative and jussive following the negative particle lā.
The distinction of affirmative and negative is not mood but polarity.
K. NOUN CLASS
In linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, but counting a given noun among nouns of such or another class is often clearly conventional. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for each (see below). Noun classes should not be confused with noun classifiers.
1. Notion
In general, there are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into noun classes:
* according to similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion),
* by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or
* through an arbitrary convention.
Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. The fact that a noun belongs to a given class may imply the presence of:
* agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals etc. which are noun phrase constituents,
* agreement affixes on the verb,
* a special form of a pronoun which replaces the noun,
* an affix on the noun,
* a class-specific word in the noun phrase (or in some types of noun phrases).
Modern English expresses noun classes through the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms. The choice between the relative pronoun who (persons) and which (non-persons) may also be considered a way of categorizing nouns into noun classes. A few nouns also exhibit vestigial noun classes, such as actress, where the suffix -ess added to actor denotes a female person. This type of noun affixation is not very frequent in English, but quite common in languages which have the true grammatical gender, including most of the Indo-European family, to which English belongs.
When noun class is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender.
In languages without inflectional noun classes, nouns may still be extensively categorized by independent particles called noun classifiers.
2. Common Criteria For Noun Classes
Common criteria that define noun classes include:
* animate vs. inanimate (as in Ojibwe)
* rational vs. non-rational (as in Tamil)
* human vs. non-human
* human vs. animal vs. inanimate
* male vs. other
* male human vs. other
* masculine vs. feminine
* masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter
* strong vs. weak
* augmentative vs. diminutive
A more or less discernible correlation between noun class and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages, even in the Indo-European family.
Some linguists think the Nostratic language, a hypothesized ancestor of Indo-European and other language families, had the noun classes "human", "animal", and "object".
L. NUMBER
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" or "more than one").
The count distinctions typically, but not always, correspond to the actual count of the referents of the marked noun or pronoun.
The word "number" is also used in linguistics to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs, such as the semelfactive aspect, the iterative aspect, etc. For that use of the term, see "Grammatical aspect".
Most languages of the world have formal means to express differences of number. The most widespread distinction, as found in English and many other languages, involves a simple two-way number contrast between singular and plural (car / cars; child / children, etc.). Other more elaborate systems of number are described below.
Grammatical number is a morphological category characterized by the expression of quantity through inflection or agreement. As an example, consider the English sentences below:
That apple on the table is fresh.
Those two apples on the table are fresh.
The number of apples is marked on the noun — "apple", singular number (one item) vs. "apples", plural number (more than one item) —, on the demonstrative, "that/those", and on the verb, "is/are". Note that, especially in the second sentence, this information can be considered redundant, since quantity is already indicated by the numeral "two".
A language has grammatical number when its nouns are subdivided into morphological classes according to the quantity they express, such that:
1. Every noun belongs to a single number class. (Number partitions nouns into disjoint classes.)
2. Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs have different forms for each number class, and must be inflected to match the number of the nouns they refer to. (Number is an agreement category.)
This is the case in English: every noun is either singular or plural (a few, such as "fish", can be either, according to context), and at least some modifiers of nouns — namely the demonstratives, the personal pronouns, the articles, and verbs — are inflected to agree with the number of the nouns they refer to: "this car" and "these cars" are correct, while "*this cars" or "*these car" are ungrammatical. Only count nouns can be freely used in the singular and in the plural. Mass nouns, like "wine", "silverware" and "wisdom", are normally used only in the singular. Many languages distinguish between count nouns and mass nouns.
Not all languages have number as a grammatical category. In those that do not, quantity must be expressed either directly, with numerals, or indirectly, through optional quantifiers. However, many of these languages compensate for the lack of grammatical number with an extensive system of measure words.
There is a hierarchy among number categories: No language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural.
M. PERSON
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event, such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns. It also frequently affects verbs, sometimes nouns, and possessive relationships as well.
English distinguishes three grammatical persons: The personal pronouns I (singular) and we (plural) are in the first person. The personal pronoun you is the second person. It refers to the addressee. You is used in both the singular and plural; thou is the archaic informal second-person singular pronoun.
He, she, it, and they are in the third person. Any person, place, or thing other than the speaker and the addressee is referred to in the third person.
N. POLARITY
Grammatical polarity is the distinction of affirmative and negative, which indicates the truth or falsehood of a statement respectively. In English, grammatical polarity is generally indicated by the presence or absence of the modifier not, which negates the statement. Many other languages contain similar modifiers: Italian and Interlingua have non, Spanish has no, French has ne ... pas, Esperanto has ne, German has nicht, and Swedish has inte.
In many languages, rather than inflecting the verb, negation is expressed by adding a particle:
* Before the verb phrase, as in Spanish "No está en casa";
* Or after it, as in archaic and dialectal English "you remember not" or Dutch "Ik zie hem niet";
* Or both, as in French "Je ne sais pas" or Afrikaans "Hy kan nie Afrikaans praat nie".
Standard English usually adds the auxiliary verb do, and then adds not after it: "I did not go there". In these instances, "do" is known as a dummy auxiliary, because of its zero semantic content.
In Indo-European languages, it is not customary to speak of a negative mood, since in the languages negation is originally a grammatical particle that can be applied to a verb in any of these moods. Nevertheless, in some, like Welsh, verbs have special inflections to be used in negative clauses.
In other language families, the negative may count as a separate mood. An example is Japanese, which conjugates verbs in the negative after adding the suffix -nai (indicating negation), e.g. tabeta ("ate") and tabenakatta ("did not eat"). It could be argued that Modern English has joined the ranks of these languages, since negation in the indicative mood requires the use of an auxiliary verb and a distinct syntax in most cases. Zwicky and Pullum have shown that n't is an inflectional suffix, not a clitic or a derivational suffix[1]. Contrast, for instance, "He sings" → "He doesn't sing" (where the dummy auxiliary do has to be supplied and inflected to doesn't) with Il chante → Il ne chante pas; French adds the (discontinuous) negative particle ne ... pas, without changing the form of the verb.
O. TENSE
Grammatical tense is a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at, during, or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs.
Tense is one of at least five qualities, along with mood, voice, aspect, and person, which verb forms may express.
Tenses cannot always be translated from one language to another. While verbs in all languages have typical forms by which they are identified and indexed in dictionaries, usually the most common present tense or an infinitive, their meanings vary among languages.
There are languages (such as isolating languages, like Chinese) in which tense is not used, but implied in temporal adverbs when needed, and some (such as Japanese) in which temporal information appears in the inflection of adjectives, lending them a verb-like quality. In some languages (such as Russian) a simple verb may indicate aspect and tense.
The number of tenses in a language may be controversial, since its verbs may indicate qualities of uncertainty, frequency, completion, duration, possibility, and even whether information derives from experience or hearsay (the last two are evidentiality).
The distinction between grammatical tense, aspect, and mood is fuzzy and at times controversial. The English continuous temporal constructions express an aspect as well as a tense, and some therefore consider that aspect to be separate from tense in English. In Spanish the traditional verb tenses are also combinations of aspectual and temporal information.
Going even further, there's an ongoing dispute among modern English grammarians (see English grammar) regarding whether tense can only refer to inflected forms. In Germanic languages there are very few tenses (often only two) formed strictly by inflection, and one school contends that all complex or periphrastic time-formations are aspects rather than tenses.
The abbreviation TAM, T/A/M or TMA is sometimes found when dealing with verbal morphemes that combine tense, aspect and mood information.
In some languages, tense and other TAM information may be marked on a noun, rather than a verb. This is called nominal TAM.
P. TOPIC
In linguistics, the topic (or theme) is the part of the content of a predicated sentence. Once stated, the topic is therefore "old news", i.e. it has already been mentioned and understood. For example, the topic is emphasised in italics in the following sentences:
* The dog licked the little girl.
* The little girl was licked by the dog.
* As for the little girl, the dog licked her.
* The little girl, the dog licked her.
A distinction must be made between the sentence-level topic and the discourse-level topic. Suppose we are talking about Mike's house:
(6) Mike's house was so comfortable and warm! He really didn't want to leave, but he couldn't afford the rent, you know. And it had such a nice garden in the back!
In the example, the discourse-level topic is established in the first sentence: it is Mike's house. In the following sentence, a new "local" topic is established on the sentence level: he (Mike). But the discourse-level topic is still Mike's house, which is why the last comment does not seem out of place.
Many languages, like English, resort to different means in order to signal a new topic, such as:
* Stating it explicitly as the subject as in (1) (which tends to be considered more topic-like by the speakers).
* Using passive voice to transform an object into a subject as in (2) (for the above reason).
* Through periphrastic constructions like "As for...", "Speaking of...", etc, as in (3).
* Using topic fronting/topicalization, i. e. moving the topic to the beginning of the sentence as in (4) or using left dislocation as in (5). (The difference between the two is that in the latter case there is a resumptive pronoun, her in (5).)
There are some other languages, like Japanese or Korean, that work directly on a topic-comment frame. A new topic is always introduced in a specific way, like with a topic marker (Japanese and Korean use the suffixes wa and neun/eun, respectively). The topic can be the subject or the object of a verb, but it can also be an indirect object or even an oblique complement of any kind. It is always dislocated to the front of the sentence.
Signaling the topic as such serves the pragmatic function of avoiding repetition. In many languages, old topics are replaced with a pronoun. Pro-drop languages like Japanese tend simply to delete the old topic, which is then left implicit throughout the discourse until a new one appears.
Q. TRANSITIVITY
In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects. It is closely related to valency.
Traditional grammar makes a binary distinction between transitive verbs such as throw, injure, kiss that take a direct object, versus intransitive verbs such as fall or sit that cannot take a direct object. In practice, many languages (including English) interpret the category more flexibly: allowing, for example, ambitransitive verbs or ditransitive verbs.
In functional grammar, transitivity is considered to be a continuum rather than a binary category. The "continuum" view takes a more semantic approach, e.g. by taking into account the degree to which an action affects its object (so that the verb see is described as having "lower transitivity" than the verb kill).
R. VOICE
In grammar, the voice (also called gender or 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 actor of the verb, the verb is in the active voice. When the subject is the patient, target or undergoer of the action, it is said to be in the passive voice.
For example, in the sentence:
The cat ate the mouse.
the verb "ate" is in the active voice, but in the sentence:
The mouse was eaten by the cat.
the verbal phrase "was eaten" is passive.
In a transformation from an active-voice clause to an equivalent passive-voice construction, the subject and the direct object switch grammatical roles. The direct object gets promoted to subject, and the subject demoted to an (optional) complement. In the examples above, the mouse serves as the direct object in the active-voice version, but becomes the subject in the passive version. The subject of the active-voice version, the cat, becomes part of a prepositional phrase in the passive version of the sentence, and could be left out entirely.
