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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.
In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but the distribution of function words.
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 set of structural rules of the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and whole texts.
French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages.
The morphology of Irish is in some respects typical of an Indo-European language. Nouns are declined for number and case, and verbs for person and number. Nouns are classified by masculine or feminine gender. Other aspects of Irish morphology, while typical for an Insular Celtic language, are not typical for Indo-European, such as the presence of inflected prepositions and the initial consonant mutations. Irish syntax is also rather different from that of most Indo-European languages, due to its use of the verb–subject–object word order.
The pronoun who, in English, is an interrogative pronoun and a relative pronoun, used primarily to refer to persons.
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
French personal pronouns reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well. They also reflect the role they play in their clause: subject, direct object, indirect object, or other.
Zero copula is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship. One can distinguish languages that simply do not have a copula and languages that have a copula that is optional in some contexts.
Irish syntax is rather different from that of most Indo-European languages, especially because of its VSO word order.
In French, pronouns are inflected to indicate their role in the sentence, as well as to reflect the person, gender, and number of their referents.
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.
There are increasing differences between the syntax used in spoken Quebec French and the syntax of other regional dialects of French. In French-speaking Canada, however, the characteristic differences of Quebec French syntax are not considered standard despite their high frequency in everyday, relaxed speech.
A prepositional pronoun is a special form of a personal pronoun that is used as the object of a preposition.
An intensive pronoun adds emphasis to a statement; for example, "I did it myself." While English intensive pronouns use the same form as reflexive pronouns, an intensive pronoun is different from a reflexive pronoun because it functions as an adverbial or adnominal modifier, not as an argument of a verb. Both intensive and reflexive pronouns make reference to an antecedent. For example, compare "I will do it myself," where "myself" is a self-intensifier indicating that nobody else did it, to "I sold myself," where "myself" fills the argument role of direct object. This sentence may be extended, as in "I sold myself myself," where the second pronoun emphasizes the fact that nobody helped me to sell myself.
In traditional grammar, a subject complement is a predicative expression that follows a copula, which complements the subject of a clause by means of characterization that completes the meaning of the subject.
Vietnamese is an analytic language, meaning it conveys grammatical information primarily through combinations of words as opposed to suffixes. The basic word order is subject-verb-object (SVO), but utterances may be restructured so as to be topic-prominent. Vietnamese also has verb serialization. In Vietnamese the head of the phrase usually precedes its complements, nouns are classified according to series of lexical parameters, and pronouns may be absent from utterances. Question words in the language do not exhibit wh-movement.
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 demonstrative phrases (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
References
- 1 2 John Collinson Nesfield (1922). English Grammar, Past and Present. Macmillan. p. 155.
- Cardinaletti, Anna; Michal Starke (1999). "The typology of structural deficiency: A case study of the three classes of pronouns". In Henk van Riemsdijk (ed.). Clitics in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 145–233.