Guide to English grammar
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- Infinitive, gerund and participles
- Adjectives, adverbs and prepositions
- 1 English grammar 1 Summary Grammatical units • 2
- Sentence elements • 5
- 2 Grammatical units
ContentsIntroduction I Contents II Key to symbols IV Sentence and text English grammar 5 The simple sentence 9 Statements, questions, imperatives and exclamations 16 Questions and answers 24 Leaving out and replacing words 38 Information and emphasis 45 Spoken English and written English Verb forms The verb phrase Verb tenses and aspects The future Be, have and do Modal verbs The passive Infinitive, gerund and participles The infinitive The gerund Participles The noun phrase Nouns and noun phrases Agreement The articles: a/an and the Possessives and demonstratives Quantifiers Pronouns Numbers and measurements Adjectives, adverbs and prepositions Adjectives Adverbials Comparison Prepositions Phrasal verbs and patterns with prepositions Main clauses and sub clauses Sentences with more than one clause And, or, but, so etc Adverbial clauses Conditional clauses Noun clauses Direct and indirect speech Relative clauses Word forms Word-building Word endings: pronunciation and spelling Irregular noun plurals Irregular verb forms American English Appendix Glossary Index Key to symbols Phonetic symbols
A practical guide to English grammar IV 1 English grammar 1 Summary Grammatical units • 2 The grammatical units of English are these: word, phrase, clause and sentence. Word classes • 3 The main word classes are these: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, determiner, pronoun and conjunction. Phrases • 4 There are these kinds of phrase: verb phrase, noun phrase, adjective phrase, adverb phrase and prepositional phrase. Sentence elements • 5 The sentence elements are these: subject, verb, object, complement and adverbial. English compared with other languages • 6 English words do not have a lot of different endings for number and gender. Word order is very important in English. The verb phrase can have a complex structure. There are many idioms with prepositions. 2 Grammatical units A FLIGHT ANNOUNCEMENT “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of British Island Airways, Captain Massey and his crew welcome you on board the Start Herald Flight to Southampton. Our flight time will be approximately forty-five minutes, and we shall be climbing to an altitude of eight thousand feet and cruising at a speed of two hundred and fifty miles per hour.” (from M. Underwood and P. Barr Listeners) The grammatical units of English are words, phrases, clauses and sentences. 1 Words
We use phrases (=a group of words that are used together in a fixed expression) to build a clause (=a group of words that includes a verb and a subject and is a sentence or a main part of a sentence). Here is an example.
Here the noun phrase “our flight time” is the subject of the clause. A clause has a subject and a verb. There can be other phrases, too. In this next example we use a prepositional phrase as an adverbial.
For more about the different kinds of phrases, • 4. For subject, object, complement and adverbial, • 5 For finite and non-finite clauses, • 239 (3). A practical guide to English grammar 5
A written sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a mark such as a full stop. We can also combine two or more clauses in one sentence. For example, we can use and to link the clauses. Our flight time will be approximately forty-five minutes, and we shall be climbing to an altitude of eight thousand feet and cruising at a speed of two hundred and fifty miles an hour. For details about sentences with more than one clause, • 238. 3 Word classes 1 There are different classes of word, sometimes called “parts of speech”. The word come is a verb, letter is a noun and great is an adjective. Some words belong to more than one word class. For example, test can be a noun or a verb. He passed the test. (noun) He had to test the machine. (verb) 2 There are eight main word classes in English.
There is also a small class of words called “interjections”. They include oh, ah and mm. 3 Verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs are “vocabulary words”. Learning vocabulary means learning verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Prepositions, determiners, pronouns and conjunctions belong to much smaller classes. These words are sometimes called “grammatical words”. 4 Most word classes can be divided into sub-classes. For example:
4 Phrases There are five kinds of phrase. 1 Verb phrase: come, had thought, was left, will be climbing
2 Noun phrase: a good flight, his crew, we A noun phrase has a noun (flight), which usually has a determiner (a) and/or adjective (good) in front of it. A noun phrase can also be a pronoun (we). A practical guide to English grammar 6 3 Adjective phrase: pleasant, very late An adjective phrase has an adjective, sometimes with an adverb of degree (very). 4 Adverb phrase: quickly, almost certainly An adverb phrase has an adverb, sometimes with an adverb of degree (almost). 5 Prepositional phrase: after lunch, on the aircraft A prepositional phrase is a “preposition + noun” phrase. Yüklə 1,14 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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