The members of the sentences, as is known from the school course of the Russian language, are divided into two categories: main and secondary. Unlike the main members of the sentence, which make up the grammatical basis, minor members may be absent. Nevertheless, their role in the language is great: without additions, circumstances and definitions, our speech would be inaccurate and inexpressive.
A definition is one of the minor members of a sentence. Its general grammatical meaning is a sign of the subject. The questions that the definition answers are exactly the same as the adjective: “which?” and "whose?"
By the way, it is precisely this similarity that makes it difficult for students to perform parsing.
Accustomed to the fact that most often the adjective plays the role of definition, students mentally put an equal sign between them. But! Just as an adjective can be another member of a sentence, so a definition is expressed in different parts of speech.
To do the right parsing, you need to remember that there are two kinds of definitions: consistent and inconsistent.
The definition may be consistent or inconsistent depending on the type of subordinate relationship between words.
An agreed definition forms a relationship with the defined word by type of agreement. Simply put, both words denoting an object and its attribute stand in the same gender, case and number. Agreed definitions in the sentence are adjectives and participles in full form, participles, as well as ordinal numbers and some pronouns.
For example: Attentive (Im.p., plural) pedestrians (Im.p., plural), observing (Im.p., plural) traffic rules, cross the road only to green (B .p., m.r., unit) signal (V.p., m.r., unit) of the traffic light.
It should be noted that the separation of agreed definitions is regulated by a number of rules and usually does not cause big difficulties.
An inconsistent definition obeys the defined word most often by type of control and less often by adjacency.
An inconsistent definition is a feature of an object that can be expressed in the following ways.
- Noun and pronoun in indirect cases:
About (whose?) His novels I learned from a friend (whose?) Father.
- Syntactically indivisible phrase:
Hugo is a writer (what?) With a capital letter.
- A simple comparative degree of adjective or adverb:
Reading (what?) Out loud develops the imagination.
I had a desire (what?) To read the novel.
Since an inconsistent definition expresses a sign more specific than an agreed one, it often has the added value of circumstances and additions. Such an inconsistent definition is isolated optionally, that is, it does not have strict rules for commas on both sides.
If the author puts logical stress on an inconsistent definition , then isolation is justified.
Punctuation marks between definitions are also necessary if they are homogeneous, even if definitions expressed in different parts of speech are in the same row.