Although sentences can be infinitely rich and complex, they are based on nounsand verbs. Nearly everything else provides information about the nouns andverbs in some way.we can say that nouns tend to be the names of things, whereas verbs tendto be words that describe actions and states of being. On this basis, we can seethat sentences generally express two types of relations: (a) an agent performingan action; (b) existence. Sentences...
Clauses
All sentences in English can be divided into the two constituents of subject and predicate, even when, as sometimes occurs, the subject isn’t an explicit part of a given sentence.Almost everything else that one may see in a sentence will be part of either the subject or the predicate.In addition, a subject/predicate combination constitutes what is referred to as a clause.This means that every sentence is a clau...
PRONOUNS
English, like other languages, resists the duplication of nouns in sentences, so it replaces duplicated nouns with what are called pronouns. (No one is sure why languages resist such duplication.) The nouns that get replaced are called antecedents. Consider sentence 1:1. Rahul liked Divya, so Rahul took Divya to a movie.The duplication of the proper nouns Rahul and Divya just does not sound right to most people because English...
Common Nouns, Proper Nouns, and Mass Nouns
There are three major types of nouns.Common nouns, as the name suggests, are the largest variety. Common nouns signify a general class of words used in naming and include such words as those in the following list: car, shoe, computer, baby, disk, pad,etc.Proper nouns, on the other hand, are specific names, such as Mr. smith.Mass nouns are a special category of common nouns. What makes them distinct is that, unlike simple common...
NOUNS
As noted earlier, subjects and predicates are related to nouns and verbs. Traditional grammar defines a noun as a person, place, or thing. However, this definition is not the best because it isn’t sufficiently inclusive. The word Monday, for example, is a noun, but it is not a thing, nor is freedom or any number of other words. For this reason, it is tempting to define a noun in terms of function:A noun is any word that can function...
Phrases
Although nouns and verbs provide an adequate classification system for very simple grammatical analyzes, they do not sufficiently account for the fact that sentences are made up of groups of words (and not just subjects and predicates) that function together. Subjects, for example, are not always composed of a single noun; more often than not they are made up of a noun and one or more other words working in conjunction with the...
Independent and Dependent Clauses
There are two major types of clauses: Independent and dependent.One way to differentiate the two types is to understand that dependent clauses always supply information to an independent clause. That is, they function as modifiers. Another way is to understand that dependent clauses begin with a word (sometimes two words) that links them to an independent clause. A clause that begins with one of these words cannot function as...
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