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Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
A prediction (Latin præ-, "before," and dicere, "to say") or forecast is a statement about the way things will happen in the future, often but not always based on experience or knowledge. While there is much overlap between prediction and forecast, a prediction may be a statement that some outcome is expected, while a forecast is more specific, and may cover a range of possible outcomes.
Although guaranteed information about the future is in many cases impossible, prediction is necessary to allow plans to be made about possible developments; Howard H. Stevenson writes that prediction in business "... is at least two things: Important and hard."
Industry:Literature
Prehistoric fiction is a literary genre in which the story is set in the period of time prior to the existence of written record, known as prehistory. As a fictional genre, the realistic description of the subject varies, not there being necessarily a commitment to develop an objective anthropological account.
Industry:Literature
The present tense is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in present time. The term "present tense" is usually used in descriptions of specific languages to refer to a particular grammatical form or set of forms; these may have a variety of uses, not all of which will necessarily refer to present time. For example, in the English sentence My train leaves tomorrow morning, the verb form leaves is said to be in the present tense, even though in this particular context it refers to an event in future time. Similarly, in the historical present, the present tense is used to narrate events that occurred in the past.
There are two common types of present tense form in most Indo-European languages: the present indicative (the combination of present tense and indicative mood) and the present subjunctive (the combination of present tense and subjunctive mood).
Present tense may be denoted by the glossing abbreviation PRES or PRS.
Industry:Literature
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, published in 1783, two years after the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. One of Kant's shorter works, it contains a summary of the Critique‘s main conclusions, sometimes by arguments Kant had not used in the Critique. Kant characterizes his more accessible approach here as an "analytic" one, as opposed to the Critique‘s "synthetic" examination of successive faculties of the mind and their principles.
The book is also intended as a polemic. Kant was disappointed by the poor reception of the Critique of Pure Reason, and here he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of its critical project for the very existence of metaphysics as a science. The final appendix contains a detailed rebuttal to an unfavorable review of the Critique.
In the standard Akademie edition of Kant's works, the Prolegomena takes up part of Volume V.
Industry:Literature
Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come (cf. divine knowledge) as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the world is divine. The process of prophecy especially involves reciprocal communication of the prophet with the (divine) source of the messages. Throughout history, clairvoyance has commonly been used and associated with prophecy.
Various concepts of prophecy are found throughout all of the world's religions and cults. To a certain degree prophecy can be an integral concept within any religion or cult. The term has found deep usage in the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Baha'i along with many others.
Industry:Literature
Prose is a form of language which applies ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure (as in traditional poetry). While there are critical debates on the construction of prose, its simplicity and loosely defined structure has led to its adoption for the majority of spoken dialogue, factual discourse as well as topical and fictional writing. It is commonly used, for example, in literature, newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, broadcasting, film, history, philosophy, law and many other forms of communication.
Industry:Literature
A protagonist, meaning "one who plays the first part, chief actor") is the main character (the central or primary personal figure) of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, who enters conflict because of the antagonist. The audience is intended to mostly identify with the protagonist. In the theatre of Ancient Greece, three actors played every main dramatic role in a tragedy; the protagonist played the leading role whereas the deuteragonist and the tritagonist played the others.
The terms protagonist and main character are variously explained and, depending on the source, may denote different concepts. In fiction, the story of the protagonist can be told from the perspective of a different character (who may also, but not necessarily, be the narrator). An example would be a narrator who relates the fate of several protagonists - perhaps as prominent figures recalled in a biographical perspective.
Sometimes, antagonists and protagonists may overlap, depending on what their ultimate objectives are considered to be. Often, the protagonist in a narrative is also the same person as the focal character, though the two terms are distinct. Excitement and intrigue alone is what the audience feels toward a focal character, while a sense of empathy about the character's objectives and emotions is what the audience feels toward the protagonist. Although the protagonist is often referred to as the "good guy", it is entirely possible for a story's protagonist to be the clear villain, or antihero, of the piece.
The principal opponent of the protagonist is a character known as the antagonist, who represents or creates obstacles that the protagonist must overcome. As with protagonists, there may be more than one antagonist in a story. The antagonist may be the story's hero; for example, where the protagonist is a criminal, the antagonist could be a law enforcement agent that tries to capture him.
Sometimes, a work will offer a particular character as the protagonist, only to dispose of that character unexpectedly, as a dramatic device. Such a character is called a false protagonist. Marion in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) is a famous example.
When the work contains subplots, these may have different protagonists from the main plot. In some novels, the protagonists may be impossible to identify, because multiple plots in the novel do not permit clear identification of one as the main plot, such as in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, depicting a variety of characters imprisoned and living in a gulag camp, or in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, depicting 15 major characters involved in or affected by a war.
In psychodrama, the "protagonist" is the person (group member, patient or client) who decides to enact some significant aspect of his life, experiences or relationships on stage with the help of the psychodrama director and other group members; in this case, the protagonist takes supplementary roles as auxiliary egos.
Industry:Literature
A proverb (from Latin: proverbium) is a simple and concrete saying, popularly known and repeated, that expresses a truth based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim.
Proverbs are often borrowed from similar languages and cultures, and sometimes come down to the present through more than one language. Both the Bible (including, but not limited to the Book of Proverbs) and medieval Latin (aided by the work of Erasmus) have played a considerable role in distributing proverbs across Europe. Mieder has concluded that cultures that treat the Bible as their "major spiritual book contain between three hundred and five hundred proverbs that stem from the Bible." However, almost every culture has examples of its own unique proverbs.
Industry:Literature
The Book of Psalms, commonly referred to simply as Psalms, is the first book of the "Writings", the third section of the Hebrew bible. The English title is from the Greek translation, psalmoi, meaning instrumental music and, by extension, the words accompanying the music. There are 150 psalms in the Jewish and Western Christian tradition (more in the Eastern Christian churches), many of them linked to the name of King David, but his authorship is not accepted by most modern Bible scholars.
Industry:Literature
Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction, film, and video games (as a narrative) which relies on the characters' fears and emotional instability to build tension.
Industry:Literature
