Intensifier. Words that are added to emphasize statements are sometimes called
“intensi ers.” More speci cally, there are two main classes of intensi ers:
adverbsand
intensive pronouns. See
emphasis.Virtually any adverb modifying an
adjective can be said to intensify it, but the term is usually reserved for such words as very The apple is very red Lesser and greater degrees of intensi cation are possible with words like somewhat or
“extremely.” See
modifier.Intensive pronouns
work like intensifying adverbs, adding force to other pronouns or
nouns: The tiger itself ate the kill Compounds of self are the commonest intensive pronouns, as in this example.
Interface. Except in discussions of computer technology,
interface as noun or
verbis probably best avoided as jargon or a
cliché. WRONG We need to interface on this problem RIGHT We need to meet on (talk about) this problem.”
Interjection. Words that appear intrusively in a sentence and that carry some force or charge of feeling are called interjections Oh my, what a nice day!”
Such words are usually set o in
commas wherever they appear in the
sentence,and the sentence that includes
interjections can end in an exclamation point to further emphasize the statement We don’t, of course, want that to happen This example could have ended with a
period. It would be hard to justify omitting the commas from the example because the interjection is fairly forceful but other sentences with milder interjections do so It is therefore clear what happened Therefore in the example is an interjection that could have been enclosed in commas but is perfectly clear as shown. See
emphasis.Interrogative. Words that signal questioning in a sentence are called
“interrogatives”: how what
“when,” where which
“who,” whose “why,”
and the like. Interrogative
sentences usually end in a question mark: How are you feeling?”
Just as interrogative words can function in a sentence that is not a
question (I told how I felt and what I wanted, so questions can be formed without interrogative words,
by changing the order of words, adding question marks, and soon Are you feeling well The most common way to indicate a question besides the question mark is to invert the word order of a sentence,
moving a verb to the initial position,
as in the example (see
inversion). Very often the verb moved to the front of a sentence to make a question is an
auxiliary verb Did the pupils write well?”
But interrogative forms can also be produced more crudely, without inversion or interrogative words Working hard The question signal here is the shortness and
fragmentary nature of the sentence (see
fragment), along with the question mark.
Longer sentences that lack interrogatives or changed word order but are followed by question
marks are not really questions, usually, but statements in which the writer has no confidence. Such superfluous questions should be avoided.
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