The word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs", the predicate is "runs", because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally". Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John.". A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive.[71] Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "agh!" or "wow!", or ideophones that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called: san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student" — three students For trees, it would be: san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree" — three trees |
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