* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download "noun as adjective"?
Ojibwe grammar wikipedia , lookup
Udmurt grammar wikipedia , lookup
Macedonian grammar wikipedia , lookup
Kannada grammar wikipedia , lookup
Georgian grammar wikipedia , lookup
Old Irish grammar wikipedia , lookup
Chinese grammar wikipedia , lookup
Old English grammar wikipedia , lookup
Lithuanian grammar wikipedia , lookup
Serbo-Croatian grammar wikipedia , lookup
Portuguese grammar wikipedia , lookup
Compound (linguistics) wikipedia , lookup
Modern Hebrew grammar wikipedia , lookup
Arabic grammar wikipedia , lookup
Romanian nouns wikipedia , lookup
Modern Greek grammar wikipedia , lookup
Ukrainian grammar wikipedia , lookup
Old Norse morphology wikipedia , lookup
Spanish grammar wikipedia , lookup
Romanian grammar wikipedia , lookup
Japanese grammar wikipedia , lookup
Scottish Gaelic grammar wikipedia , lookup
Malay grammar wikipedia , lookup
Swedish grammar wikipedia , lookup
Determiner phrase wikipedia , lookup
Latin syntax wikipedia , lookup
Literary Welsh morphology wikipedia , lookup
Zulu grammar wikipedia , lookup
Russian grammar wikipedia , lookup
Vietnamese grammar wikipedia , lookup
Pipil grammar wikipedia , lookup
Turkish grammar wikipedia , lookup
Esperanto grammar wikipedia , lookup
Ancient Greek grammar wikipedia , lookup
Comparison (grammar) wikipedia , lookup
English grammar wikipedia , lookup
Yiddish grammar wikipedia , lookup
guide to writing rules & freedom of mind www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011 let’s remember • SVO! • Adjective BEFORE Noun • Adjective AFTER certain Verbs • Noun As Adjective • Comparative Adjectives www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011 Adjective Before Noun We sometimes use more than one adjective before the noun: • I like big black dogs. • She was wearing a beautiful long red dress. What is the correct order for two or more adjectives? 1. The general order is: opinion, fact: • a nice French car (not a French nice car) ("Opinion" is what you think about something. "Fact" is what is definitely true about something.) 2. The normal order for fact adjectives is size, age, shape, colour, material, origin: • a big, old, square, black, wooden Chinese table 3. Determiners usually come first, even though they are fact adjectives: • • • • • articles (a, the) possessives (my, your...) demonstratives (this, that...) quantifiers (some, any, few, many...) numbers (one, two, three) When we want to use two colour adjectives, we join them with "and": • Many newspapers are black and white. • She was wearing a long, blue and yellow dress. www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011 Adjective After certain Verbs An adjective can come after some verbs, such as: be, become, feel, get, look, seem, smell, sound Even when an adjective comes after the verb and not before a noun, it always refers to and qualifies the subject of the sentence, not the verb. Look at the examples below: subject verb adjective • • • • • • • • • • Ram is English. Because she had to wait, she became impatient. Is it getting dark? The examination did not seem difficult. Your friend looks nice. This towel feels damp. That new film doesn't sound very interesting. Dinner smells good tonight. This milk tastes sour. It smells bad. These verbs are "stative" verbs, which express a state or change of state, not "dynamic" verbs which express an action. Note that some verbs can be stative in one sense (she looks beautiful | it got hot), and dynamic in another (she looked at him | he got the money). The above examples do not include all stative verbs. Note also that in the above structure (subject verb adjective), the adjective can qualify a pronoun since the subject may be a pronoun. Wednesday, November 30, 2011 www.sayfun.me Noun As Adjective As you know, a noun is a person, place or thing, and an adjective is a word that describes a noun: adjective noun clever teacher small office black horse Sometimes we use a noun to describe another noun. In that case, the first noun "acts as" an adjective. noun as adjective noun history teacher ticket office race horse The "noun as adjective" always comes first If you remember this it will help you to understand what is being talked about: • • • • • • • • • a race horse is a horse that runs in races a horse race is a race for horses a boat race is a race for boats a love story is a story about love a war story is a story about war a tennis ball is a ball for playing tennis tennis shoes are shoes for playing tennis a computer exhibition is an exhibition of computers a bicycle shop is a shop that sells bicycles www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011 Noun As Adjective The "noun as adjective" is singular Just like a real adjective, the "noun as adjective" is invariable. It is usually in the singular form. Right Wrong boat race -> boat races NOT boats race, boats races toothbrush -> toothbrushes NOT teethbrush, teethbrushes shoe-lace -> shoe-laces NOT shoes-lace, shoes-laces cigarette packet -> cigarette packets NOT cigarettes packet, cigarettes packets In other words, if there is a plural it is on the real noun only. A few nouns look plural but we usually treat them as singular (for example news, billiards, athletics). When we use these nouns "as adjectives" they are unchanged: • a news reporter, three news reporters • one billiards table, four billiards tables • an athletics trainer, fifty athletics trainers Exceptions: When we use certain nouns "as adjectives" (clothes, sports, customs, accounts, arms), we use them in the plural form: • clothes shop, clothes shops • sports club, sports clubs • customs duty, customs duties • accounts department, accounts departments • arms production How do we write the "noun as adjective"? We write the "noun as adjective" and the real noun in several different ways: • two separate words (car door) • two hyphenated words (book-case) • one word (bathroom) There are no easy rules for this. We even write some combinations in two or all three different ways: (head master, head-master, headmaster) www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011 Comparative Adjectives There are two ways to make or form a comparative adjective: • short adjectives: add "-er" • long adjectives: use "more" Short adjectives • 1-syllable adjectives - example: old, fast • 2-syllable adjectives ending in -y - example: happy, easy Normal rule: add "-er" example: old → older Variation: if the adjective ends in -e, just add -r example: late → later Variation: if the adjective ends in consonant, vowel, consonant, double the last consonant Variation: if the adjective ends in -y, change the y to i example: happy → happier Long adjectives • 2-syllable adjectives not ending in -y - example: modern, pleasant • all adjectives of 3 or more syllables - example: expensive, intellectual Normal rule: use "more" modern → more modern expensive → more expensive www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011 example: big → bigger compare.... We use comparative adjectives when talking about 2 things (not 3 or 10 or 1,000,000 things, only 2 things). Often, the comparative adjective is followed by "than". Look at these examples: • • • • John is 1m80. He is tall. But Chris is 1m85. He is taller than John. America is big. But Russia is bigger. I want to have a more powerful computer. Is French more difficult than English? If we talk about the two planets Earth and Mars, we can compare them as shown in the table below: Earth Mars 12,760 150 24 6,790 228 25 Moons 1 Surface temperature (degrees Celcius) 22 2 -23 Diameter (km) Distance from Sun (million km) Length of day (hours) www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011 -> Mars is smaller than Earth. -> Mars is more distant from the Sun. -> A day on Mars is slightly longer than a day on Earth. -> Mars has more moons than Earth. -> Mars is colder than Earth. Determiners Determiners are words like the, an, my, some. They are grammatically similar. They all come at the beginning of noun phrases, and usually we cannot use more than one determiner in the same noun phrase. Articles: • a, an, the Possessive Adjectives: • my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose Other determiners: • • • • • • • • • • each, every either, neither some, any, no much, many; more, most little, less, least few, fewer, fewest what, whatever; which, whichever both, half, all several enough www.sayfun.me Wednesday, November 30, 2011