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English grammar essentials: an overview
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School
Revision of the parts of English speech
(A strong grasp of language mechanics gives writers more creative power)
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School
Nouns are things.
We divide nouns into two main groups:

common nouns

proper nouns
Common nouns describe groups or broadly identify something
− e.g. girl, ships, coffee, faces, leg, sunlight, attitudes,
sadness, thought.
Proper nouns refer to something specific or unique – e.g.
Madonna, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Toyota, Christmas, Julia
Gillard, Kevin Rudd, New Zealand, Cate Blanchett.
Nouns
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School
We may also divide nouns into:

concrete (desk) and abstract (knowledge)
as well as into

countable (songs) and uncountable (music).
(These categories are important for working out
whether to use an article − a, an, the − or not.)
More types of nouns
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

Verbs are doing or action words – e.g. woke, eating,
dressed, drive, work, crash, laughing, exist, dreamt,
appear, became, invented, shout.

Without a verb, a sentence is not a sentence, because
something has to happen to turn a group of words into a
complete idea or sentence.

There are different types of verbs: regular & irregular,
main & auxiliary, transitive & intransitive, finite & infinite.

English verbs have twelve main tenses. These are
present, past and future versions of four main types of
tense: simple, continuous, perfect and perfect
continuous.
Verbs
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

Adjectives are describing words – e.g. chilly,
beautiful, perceptive, powerful, hairy, obedient,
odd, bare, tropical, scandalous, intelligent, loud.

Adjectives describe nouns. They tell us more
about nouns – e.g. a boring film, an obvious
mistake, a lively party.

Adjectives may tell us more about size, colour,
quality, quantity, origin and much more.
Adjectives
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

The role of adverbs is to add information to other kinds of
word.

They may do this in three ways:

◦
modifying a verb (e.g. The student yawned wearily over
her books.)
◦
modifying an adjective (e.g. He is an extremely unlucky man.)
◦
modifying another adverb (e.g. The new items sold very
quickly.)
Although adverbs often end in ly, this is not always the case,
as you can see above.
Adverbs
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

Pronouns are useful stand-ins or substitutes for
nouns and noun phrases. By using a pronoun, we
can avoid having to repeat a noun in the same
sentence – e.g. ‘He saw Peter in the street and ran
to catch up to Peter’ could be better phrased as ‘He
saw Peter in the street and ran to catch up to him.’

There are many different kinds of pronouns:
personal, possessive, reflexive, demonstrative,
interrogative, relative, indefinite, reciprocal. (Don’t
worry about all the subgroups − more on these later!)
Pronouns
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

The word the is called the definite article. It is used to
refer to a specific or particular thing, as in the terrorist,
the forecast rise in interest rates, the graffiti on the
Hexham bridge, the highest mountain in Australia.

A and an are known as the indefinite articles. These
are used to refer to single instances of some general
countable group – for instance, a motor car, an ice
cream, a wild animal, an ostrich, a murderer, an actor.

Sometimes, no article at all is necessary, as in the
cases of uncountable common nouns (e.g. ‘Your coffee
needs more sugar’) and abstract nouns (e.g.
‘Knowledge is the key to power.’)
Definite & indefinite articles
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School
There are three types of conjunctions:

Coordinating conjunctions − i.e. for, and, nor, but, or,
yet, so − link words, phrases and clauses of equal
importance. You will hear more about them when we look at
compound sentences.

Subordinating conjunctions – e.g. although, because,
until, while − link less important units (groups of words) to
more important units to make complex sentences. They
play a very important role in academic discussions
through the creation of subtle relationships between
ideas.

Correlative conjunctions are used in pairs (e.g. either…or).
They help to establish relationships between nouns and noun
phrases.
Conjunctions
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

Prepositions link verbs to nouns, pronouns and
noun phrases in such a way that they tell us
something about the relationship between them.

In the process, prepositions may tell us
something about space, time and reason.

Here are some examples of prepositions:
above, against, at, before, beneath,
concerning, despite, during, outside, since.
Prepositions
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

A phrase is a group of words that does not express
a complete idea. A phrase is only a fragment of an
idea – e.g. ‘their first meeting’. Stand-alone phrases
can have a very poetic effect in fiction, but should
not be used in formal academic writing.

A clause contains both a subject (a thing doing
something) and a verb (what is being done). Even if
it is only part of a larger construction, such as a
compound or complex sentence, it makes some
sense on its own. It says, in simple terms, who
does what. This is enough to constitute a complete
idea.
Phrases & clauses
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School
The parts of speech we have looked at so far are all building blocks of
sentences.

Put simply, a sentence tells us who does what or something is
something.

Another way of defining a sentence is to say that a sentence is a group of
words that together make up a complete unit of meaning or thought.

In order for a sentence to be considered complete, it must have a subject
and a predicate.
Subject = who
Predicate = verb (does) + object (what)

Note that it is possible to create a sentence without an object – e.g. “The
eagle soars”; “Harry laughed”. However, a sentence must have both a
subject and a predicate which consists, at least, of a verb. In other words,
at minimum, a sentence must have a subject and a verb.
Sentences
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School

King, G. (2000). Good Grammar. Glasgow, UK:
HarperCollins.

Dr Jim Jose, Associate Professor, School of
Economics, Politics & Tourism, for his guidance
through my reference to his Study Skills Online
(2000).
References
Devised by Jo Killmister, Skills
Enhancement Program, Newcastle
Business School