In semantics, a modifier is said to be restrictive (or defining) if it restricts the reference of its head.[1] For example, in "the red car is fancier than the blue one", red and blue are restrictive, because they restrict which cars car and one are referring to. ("The car is fancier than the one" would make little sense.) By contrast, in "John's beautiful mother", beautiful is non-restrictive; "John's mother" identifies her sufficiently, whereas "beautiful" only serves to add more information.
Restrictive modifiers are also called defining, identifying, essential, or necessary; non-restrictive ones are also called non-defining, non-identifying, descriptive, or unnecessary (though this last term can be misleading). In certain cases, generally when restrictiveness is marked syntactically through the lack of commas,[clarification needed] restrictive modifiers are called integrated and non-restrictive ones are called non-integrated or supplementary.
English does not generally mark modifiers for restrictiveness, with the exception of relative clauses: non-restrictive ones are set off in speech through intonation (with a pause beforehand and an uninterrupted melody[dubious–discuss]) and in writing by using commas, whereas restrictive clauses are not. Furthermore, although restrictive clauses can be headed by any of the relative pronounswho(m), which, that or by a zero, non-restrictive clauses can only be headed by who(m) or which. For example:
Restrictive: We saw two puppies this morning: one that was born yesterday and one that was born last week. The one that (orwhich[lower-alpha 1]) was born yesterday is tiny.
Non-restrictive: We saw a puppy and a kitty this morning. The puppy, which was born yesterday, was tiny.
Although English does not consistently mark ordinary adjectives for restrictiveness, they can be marked periphrastically by moving them into relative clauses. For example, "John's beautiful wife" can be rewritten as "John's wife, who is beautiful", to avoid the suggestion of disambiguation between John's various wives. A sentence unmarked for restrictiveness, like "The red car is fancier than the blue one," can—if necessary—be rephrased to make it explicitly restrictive or non-restrictive:
Restrictive: The car that's red is fancier than the one that's blue.
Non-restrictive: The car, which is red, is fancier than the other, which is blue.
English speakers do not generally find such locutions necessary, however.
In linguistics, an adjective is a word that modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
English grammar is the way in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.
The comma, is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight but inclined from the vertical. Other fonts give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure 9 on the baseline.
An adjective phrase is a phrase the head of which is an adjective, almost any grammar or syntax textbook or dictionary of linguistics terminology defines the adjective phrase in a similar way, e.g. Kesner Bland (1996:499), Crystal (1996:9), Greenbaum (1996:288ff.), Haegeman and Guéron (1999:70f.), Brinton (2000:172f.), Jurafsky and Martin (2000:362).</ref> The adjective can initiate the phrase, conclude the phrase, or appear in a medial position. The dependents of the head adjective—i.e. the other words and phrases inside the adjective phrase—are typically adverb or prepositional phrases, but they can also be clauses. Adjectives and adjective phrases function in two basic ways, attributively or predicatively. An attributive adjective (phrase) precedes the noun of a noun phrase. A predicative adjective (phrase) follows a linking verb and serves to describe the preceding subject, e.g. The man is very happy.
In language, a clause is a constituent that links a semantic predicand and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase, a verb with any objects and other modifiers. However, the subject is sometimes not said or explicit, often the case in null-subject languages if the subject is retrievable from context, but it sometimes also occurs in other languages such as English.
In linguistics, a modifier is an optional element in phrase structure or clause structure which modifies the meaning of another element in the structure. For instance, the adjective "red" acts as a modifier in the noun phrase "red ball", providing extra detail about which particular ball is under discussion. Similarly, the adverb "quickly" acts as a modifier in the verb phrase "run quickly".
A dangling modifier is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. A dangling modifier has no subject and is usually a participle. For example, a writer may have meant to modify the subject, but word order used means that the modifier appears to modify an object instead. Such ambiguities can lead to unintentional humor, or, in formal contexts, difficulty in comprehension.
The pronoun who, in English, is an interrogative pronoun and a relative pronoun, used primarily to refer to persons.
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that contains an element whose interpretation is provided by an expression on which the subordinate clause is grammatically dependent. The expression on which the subordinate clause is grammatically dependent is called the antecedent, and there is an anaphoric relation between the relativized element in the relative clause and antecedent on which it depends.
A subordinate clause, dependent clause or embedded clause is a clause that is embedded within a complex sentence. For instance, in the English sentence "I know that Bette is a dolphin", the clause "that Bette is a dolphin" occurs as the complement of the verb "know" rather than as a freestanding sentence. Subtypes of dependent clauses include content clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses.
Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side and so one element identifies the other in a different way. The two elements are said to be in apposition, and one of the elements is called the appositive, but its identification requires consideration of how the elements are used in a sentence.
The Tunica or Luhchi Yoroni language is a language isolate that was spoken in the Central and Lower Mississippi Valley in the United States by Native American Tunica peoples. There are no native speakers of the Tunica language, but as of 2017, there are 32 second language speakers.
A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause. It serves the purpose of conjoining modifying information about an antecedent referent.
Relative clauses in the English language are formed principally by means of relative pronouns. The basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Various grammatical rules and style guides determine which relative pronouns may be suitable in various situations, especially for formal settings. In some cases the relative pronoun may be omitted and merely implied.
Spanish pronouns in some ways work quite differently from their English counterparts. Subject pronouns are often omitted, and object pronouns can appear either as proclitics that come before the verb or enclitics attached to the end of it in different linguistic environments. There is also regional variation in the use of pronouns, particularly the use of the informal second-person singular vos and the informal second-person plural vosotros.
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct category, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun, along with common and proper nouns.[p. 22] Still others see them as a subcategory of determiner. In this article, they are treated as a subtype of the noun category.
An attributive verb is a verb that modifies a noun in the manner of an attributive adjective, rather than express an independent idea as a predicate.
The term equative is used in linguistics to refer to constructions where two entities are equated with each other. For example, the sentence Susan is our president, equates two entities "Susan" and "our president". In English, equatives are typically expressed using a copular verb such as "be", although this is not the only use of this verb. Equatives can be contrasted with predicative constructions where one entity is identified as a member of a set, such as Susan is a president. This view has been contrasted by Otto Jespersen in the first part of the XX century and by Giuseppe Longobardi and Andrea Moro in the second. In particular, Andrea Moro in 1988 proved that either DP must be non referential in the sense of Geach (1962) by exploiting arguments based on binding theory. The idea is that when a DP plays the role of predicate it enlarges its binding domain: for example, in John met his cook the pronoun can refer to the subject John but in John is his cook it cannot. The key-step was to admit that the DP following the copula can be referential whereas the one preceding must not, in other words the key-step was to admit that there can be inverse copular sentences, namely those where the subject, which is referential, follows the predicate. For a discussion starting from Moro's data see Heycock (2012). For a historical view of the development of the analysis of the copula see Moro
In linguistics, a relativizer is a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause. For example, in English, the conjunction that may be considered a relativizer in a sentence such as "I have one that you can use." Relativizers do not appear, at least overtly, in all languages; even in languages that do have overt or pronounced relativizers, they do not necessarily appear all of the time. For these reasons it has been suggested that in some cases, a "zero relativizer" may be present, meaning that a relativizer is implied in the grammar but is not actually realized in speech or writing. For example, the word that can be omitted in the above English example, producing "I have one you can use", using a zero relativizer.
In grammar, sentence and clause structure, commonly known as sentence composition, is the classification of sentences based on the number and kind of clauses in their syntactic structure. Such division is an element of traditional grammar.
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