In linguistics, a copula /‘kɑpjələ/ 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 cooperative." The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things.
In linguistics, declension is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners to indicate number, case, gender, and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.
Infinitive is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The name is derived from Late Latin [modus] infinitivus, a derivative of infinitus meaning "unlimited".
An adjective is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by answering questions such as how, in what way, when, where, to what extent. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by an individual adverb, by an adverbial phrase, or by an adverbial clause.
The Finnish language is spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns elsewhere. Unlike the Indo-European languages spoken in neighbouring countries, such as Swedish and Norwegian, which are North Germanic languages, or Russian, which is a Slavic language, Finnish is a Uralic language of the Finnic languages group. Typologically, Finnish is agglutinative. As in some other Uralic languages, Finnish has vowel harmony, and like other Finnic languages, it has consonant gradation.
Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as in "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.
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 linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign. Consequently, a compound is a unit composed of more than one stem, forming words or signs. If the joining of the words or signs is orthographically represented with a hyphen, the result is a hyphenated compound. If they are joined without an intervening space, it is a closed compound. If they are joined with a space, then the result – at least in English – may be an open compound.
Swedish is descended from Old Norse. Compared to its progenitor, Swedish grammar is much less characterized by inflection. Modern Swedish has two genders and no longer conjugates verbs based on person or number. Its nouns have lost the morphological distinction between nominative and accusative cases that denoted grammatical subject and object in Old Norse in favor of marking by word order. Swedish uses some inflection with nouns, adjectives, and verbs. It is generally a subject–verb–object (SVO) language with V2 word order.
Haida is the language of the Haida people, spoken in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of Canada and on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. An endangered language, Haida currently has 24 native speakers, though revitalization efforts are underway. At the time of the European arrival at Haida Gwaii in 1774, it is estimated that Haida speakers numbered about 15,000. Epidemics soon led to a drastic reduction in the Haida population, which became limited to three villages: Masset, Skidegate, and Hydaburg. Positive attitudes towards assimilation combined with the ban on speaking Haida in residential schools led to a sharp decline in the use of the Haida language among the Haida people, and today almost all ethnic Haida use English to communicate.
The morphology of the Welsh language has many characteristics likely to be unfamiliar to speakers of English or continental European languages like French or German, but has much in common with the other modern Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, and Breton. Welsh is a moderately inflected language. Verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and mood, with affirmative, interrogative, and negative conjugations of some verbs. There is no case inflection in Modern Welsh.
Tweants is a group of non-standardised Dutch Low Saxon dialects, descending from Old Saxon.
-ing is a suffix used to make one of the inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle, as a gerund, and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective. The suffix is also found in certain words like morning and ceiling, and in names such as Browning.
This article provides a grammar sketch of the Nawat or Pipil language, an endangered language spoken by the Pipils of western El Salvador and Nicarao people of Nicaragua. It belongs to the Nahua group within the Uto-Aztecan language family. There also exists a brief typological overview of the language that summarizes the language's most salient features of general typological interest in more technical terms.
This article summarizes grammar in the Hawaiian language.
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 sentences, 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.
Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia; it is a separate standard language rather than a national variety, unlike Netherlands Dutch, Belgian Dutch and Surinamese Dutch. An estimated 90 to 95% of Afrikaans vocabulary is ultimately of Dutch origin, so there are few lexical differences between the two languages, however Afrikaans has considerably more regular morphology, grammar, and spelling.
Raga is the language of northern Pentecost Island in Vanuatu. Like all Vanuatu languages, Raga belongs to the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages family. In old sources the language is sometimes referred to by the names of villages in which it is spoken, such as Bwatvenua (Qatvenua), Lamalanga, Vunmarama and Loltong.
Malay grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the Malay language and Indonesian. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses and sentences. In Malay and Indonesian, there are four basic parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and grammatical function words (particles). Nouns and verbs may be basic roots, but frequently they are derived from other words by means of prefixes and suffixes.
