In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
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.
A noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.
In linguistics, a determiner phrase (DP) is a type of phrase posited by many modern theories of syntax. Many other approaches, however, reject the DP analysis in favor of the more traditional NP analysis of nominal groups. Thus, there are competing analyses concerning heads and dependents in nominal groups. For example in the phrase the car, the is a determiner and car is a noun; the two combine to form a phrase. On the DP analysis, the determiner the is head over the noun car, while on the NP analysis, the noun car is the head, which means the phrase is an NP, not a DP.
A language is head-marking if the grammatical marks showing agreement between different words of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of phrases, rather than on the modifiers or dependents. Many languages employ both head-marking and dependent-marking, and some languages double up and are thus double-marking. The concept of head/dependent-marking was proposed by Johanna Nichols in 1986 and has come to be widely used as a basic category in linguistic typology.
In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound. For example, the head of the compound noun handbag is bag, since a handbag is a bag, not a hand. The other elements of the phrase or compound modify the head, and are therefore the head's dependents. Headed phrases and compounds are called endocentric, whereas exocentric ("headless") phrases and compounds lack a clear head. Heads are crucial to establishing the direction of branching. Head-initial phrases are right-branching, head-final phrases are left-branching, and head-medial phrases combine left- and right-branching.
In Modern English, they is a third-person pronoun relating to a grammatical subject.
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesnière. Dependency is the notion that linguistic units, e.g. words, are connected to each other by directed links. The (finite) verb is taken to be the structural center of clause structure. All other syntactic units (words) are either directly or indirectly connected to the verb in terms of the directed links, which are called dependencies. Dependency grammar differs from phrase structure grammar in that while it can identify phrases it tends to overlook phrasal nodes. A dependency structure is determined by the relation between a word and its dependents. Dependency structures are flatter than phrase structures in part because they lack a finite verb phrase constituent, and they are thus well suited for the analysis of languages with free word order, such as Czech or Warlpiri.
Standard Romanian shares largely the same grammar and most of the vocabulary and phonological processes with the other three surviving varieties of Balkan Romance, namely Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.
Persian grammar is the grammar of the Persian language, whose dialectal variants are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. It is similar to that of many other Indo-European languages. The language became a more analytical language around the time of Middle Persian, with fewer cases and discarding grammatical gender. The innovations remain in Modern Persian, which is one of the few Indo-European languages to lack grammatical gender.
In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial or head-final. The head is the element that determines the category of a phrase: for example, in a verb phrase, the head is a verb. Therefore, head initial would be "VO" languages and head final would be "OV" languages.
This article describes the grammar of Tigrinya, a South Semitic language which is spoken primarily in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and is written in Ge'ez script.
Nivaclé is a Matacoan language spoken in Paraguay and in Argentina by the Nivaclé. It is also known as Chulupí and Ashluslay, and in older sources has been called Ashluslé, Suhin, Sujín, Chunupí, Churupí, Choropí, and other variant spellings of these names. Nivaclé speakers are found in the Chaco, in Paraguay in Presidente Hayes Department, and Boquerón Department, and in Argentina in Salta Province.
A determiner, also called determinative, is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common kinds of determiners include definite and indefinite articles, demonstratives, possessive determiners, cardinal numerals, quantifiers, distributive determiners, and interrogative determiners (which).
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. Still others see them as a subcategory of determiner. In this article, they are treated as a subtype of the noun category.
Breton is a Brittonic Celtic language in the Indo-European family, and its grammar has many traits in common with these languages. Like most Indo-European languages it has grammatical gender, grammatical number, articles and inflections and like the other Celtic languages, Breton has two genders: masculine and feminine. In addition to the singular–plural system, it also has a singulative–collective system, similar to Welsh. Unlike the other Brittonic languages, Breton has both a definite and indefinite article, whereas Welsh and Cornish lack an indefinite article and unlike the other extant Celtic languages, Breton has been influenced by French.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
Zero-marking in English is the indication of a particular grammatical function by the absence of any morpheme. The most common types of zero-marking in English involve zero articles, zero relative pronouns, and zero subordinating conjunctions. Examples are I like cats in which the absence of the definite article, the, signals cats to be an indefinite reference, whose specific identity is not known to the listener; that's the cat I saw in which the relative clause (that) I saw omits the implied relative pronoun, that, which would otherwise be the object of the clause's verb; and I wish you were here. in which the dependent clause, (that) you were here, omits the subordinating conjunction, that.
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in terms of the number of different words and in terms of how often they are used in typical texts.[p. 16] Like nouns in general, English nouns typically denote physical objects, but they also denote actions, characteristics, relations in space (closeness), and just about anything at all.[p. 30] They typically have singular and plural forms and head noun phrases that function as subjects and objects and have determiners and adjective phrase modifiers as dependents.[p. 82]
English determiners are words – such as the, a, each, some, which, this, and six – that are most commonly used with nouns to specify their referents. The determiners form a closed lexical category in English.
