In linguistics, a copula is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word is in the sentence "The sky is blue" or the phrase was not being in the sentence "It was not being co-operative." The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things.
A verb is a word that in syntax generally conveys an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. Verbs have tenses: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done.
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.
English grammar is the set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that generally marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future. An example of a future tense form is the French aimera, meaning "will love", derived from the verb aimer ("love"). The "future" expressed by the future tense usually means the future relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is used it may mean the future relative to some other point in time under consideration.
This article outlines the grammar of the Dutch language, which shares strong similarities with German grammar and also, to a lesser degree, with English grammar.
In sociolinguistics, a sociolect is a form of language or a set of lexical items used by a socioeconomic class, profession, age group, or other social group.
Englishauxiliary verbs are a small set of English verbs, which include the English modal auxiliary verbs and a few others. Although the auxiliary verbs of English are widely believed to lack inherent semantic meaning and instead to modify the meaning of the verbs they accompany, they are nowadays classed by linguists as auxiliary on the basis not of semantic but of grammatical properties: among these, that they invert with their subjects in interrogative main clauses and are negated either by the simple addition of not or by negative inflection.
This article describes the grammar of Afrikaans, a language spoken in South Africa and Namibia which originated from 17th century Dutch.
The pluperfect, usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time in the past. Examples in English are: "we had arrived"; "they had written".
A nonfinite verb, in contrast to a finite verb, is a derivative form of a verb that lacks inflection (conjugation) for number or person. In the English language, the nonfinite verb cannot perform action as the main verb of an independent clause, while in French, the first verb is typically the only finite one. In English, nonfinite verbs include infinitives, participles and gerunds. Nonfinite verb forms in some other languages include converbs, gerundives and supines. The categories of mood, tense, and or voice may be absent from non-finite verb forms in some languages.
In French grammar, verbs are a part of speech. Each verb lexeme has a collection of finite and non-finite forms in its conjugation scheme.
Unserdeutsch, or Rabaul Creole German, is a German-based creole language that originated in Papua New Guinea as a lingua franca. The substrate language is assumed to be Tok Pisin, while the majority of the lexicon is from German.
The future perfect is a verb form or construction used to describe an event that is expected or planned to happen before a time of reference in the future, such as will have finished in the English sentence "I will have finished by tomorrow." It is a grammatical combination of the future tense, or other marking of future time, and the perfect, a grammatical aspect that views an event as prior and completed.
Esperanto and Novial are two different constructed international auxiliary languages. Their main difference is that while Esperanto is a schematic language, with an unvarying grammar, Novial is a naturalistic language, whose grammar and vocabulary varies to try to retain a "natural" sound. Demographically, Esperanto has thousands of times more speakers than Novial.
Icelandic is an inflected language. Icelandic nouns can have one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Nouns, adjectives and pronouns are declined in four cases and two numbers, singular and plural.
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language, or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders." Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.
The verb is one of the most complex parts of Basque grammar. It is sometimes represented as a difficult challenge for learners of the language, and many Basque grammars devote most of their pages to lists or tables of verb paradigms. This article does not give a full list of verb forms; its purpose is to explain the nature and structure of the system.
This article deals with the grammar of the Udmurt language.
This article deals with the grammar of the Komi language of the northeastern European part of Russia
