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ENGLISH GRAMMAR
ANIL MITRA, DECEMBER 2013—MAY 2017
Home | Also see Grammar
CONTENTS
Purpose
2
Words and phrases
2
Interjections
2
Nouns and noun phrases
3
Determiners
3
Pronouns
3
Verbs
4
Verb phrases
5
Adjectives
5
Comparison
5
Adjective phrases
5
Adverbs
6
Not
6
Adverb phrases
6
Prepositions
6
Conjunctions
6
Copula
7
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Clauses and sentences
7
OTHER MATTERS
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Prescriptive versus descriptive grammar
8
An example
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THE GRAMMAR
PURPOSE
Grammar is useful (1) in my study of language, logic and metaphysics, mathematics, and formal
systems and (2) in my anticipated study of other languages (texts on languages often use grammar
terms with which it will be useful to be familiar).
WORDS AND PHRASES
A typical category is ‘noun’. A noun, adjective, or adverb phrase functions as a noun, adjective,
or adverb.
Other kinds of phrases function differently. For example, a verb phrase consists of a verb
together with any objects and other dependents; a prepositional phrase consists of a
preposition together with its complement (and is therefore usually a type of adverb phrase);
and a determiner phrase is a type of noun phrase containing a determiner.
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs readily accept new members—they are ‘open’ classes. The
others are ‘closed’.
Interjections
Some grammars do not describe interjections because they are not part of the clause and sentence
structure of the language. However, they can form sentences ‘Ouch!’ (depending on the definition
of ‘sentence’—one functional definition being a set of words that can be normally uttered
between unforced breaks in speech; note that the occasion for such a definition is that it is seems
impossible to formulate a prescriptive definition that will include all and only those word
combinations that normal speakers speak and recognize as sentences).
Interjections are an open class.
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Nouns and noun phrases
A noun typically denotes a person, place, thing, animal or idea. A noun phrase is a group of
words that functions as a noun.
The ontological category is, roughly, the ‘entity’.
Determiners
Determiners are words or phrases that precede a noun or noun phrase that express its reference in
the context. Determiners include the articles (a or an, and the); demonstratives (this, that…);
possessives (my, the cat’s); and quantifiers such as all, some, not one, many, three…
Determiners are required in many contexts: not ‘Boy hit ball’ but ‘The /a boy hit the / a ball.’
The ontological functions include altering the specificity of the noun.
In some uses determiners are not required (the ‘zero’ determiner). Examples (a) ‘Tom is funny’
(implicit specification); but note ‘The Tom I know is good.’ (b) or ‘He is funny.’ ‘The he is
funny’. (c) ‘Cats are felines’ (all members of a class). However ‘Most cats have four legs’ (most
specifies: not all cats) and ‘The cats of Asia are awesome’ (not all cats). (c) In referring to
unspecified numbers or amounts ‘There are cats in Asia’, ‘There is cattiness in Asia’; note ‘There
are some cats in Asia.’ and ‘There is much cattiness in Asia.’ (d) With singular nouns in some
common expressions ‘Yankee Doodle came to town’ (not the town) but note ‘Yankee Doodle did
not come to this town’.
Pronouns
The pronouns constitute a small and closed class that function in place of nouns and noun
phrases.
Personal pronouns—I (nominative), me (oblique), myself (reflexive), my (possessive
determiner), mine (possessive). The nominative case declines as: 2nd person singular / plural—
you; 3rd person singular—he, she, it; 1st person plural—we; 3rd person plural—they.
Demonstrative pronouns—this, that, these, those; e.g., ‘this is good’; these can all be used as
determiners, e.g., ‘this cheese is good’; and can form pronominal expressions, e.g., this one.
Interrogative pronouns—who, what, which; ‘who’ has an oblique and possessive forms ‘whom’
and ‘whose’.
Relative pronouns—the main relative pronouns are who (and whom and whose), which, and that.
Examples: ‘The man who came to dinner.’, ‘The car that was parked in the garage.’, ‘An idea
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whose time has come.’ (As a relative pronoun, ‘whose’ need not refer to a person.). Here is a
proscribed use ‘The man what came to dinner.’
There as a pronoun—‘There is a river’ has two interpretations (1) A river exists (there as
pronoun) and (2) A river is in that place (‘there’ as an adverb).
Indefinite pronouns—pronouns that refer one or more unspecified entities. Example: no one /
nothing, everyone / everything, someone / something, anyone / anything, you / one (as in ‘one /
you should know that non attendance not allowed’.
Verbs
The syntactic function of a verb is to convey action, process, occurrence, or state of being. The
ontological / semantic function is the same: action, event, process, state.
A verb is not generally marked by word form. The infinitive is the basic form of a verb, e.g. play
or to play (bare and full infinitive). However, the suffixes –ate, –ise/ize, –fy frequently signify
verbs formed (usually?) from nouns. Many verbs are formed by prefix: under-value, out-last, unmask, over-take. And verbs can be formed from nouns and adjectives by conversion: snare, nose,
dry, and calm.
The imperative is a grammatical mood that commands or requests. Subjunctive forms of verbs are
typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment,
opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred.
The English modal verbs consist of the core modals can, could, may, might, must, shall, should,
will, would, as well as ought (to), had better, and in some uses dare and need.
The copula be, along with the modal verbs and the other auxiliaries, form a distinct class,
sometimes called “special verbs” or simply “auxiliaries”. These have different syntax from
ordinary lexical verbs, especially in that they make their interrogative forms by plain inversion
with the subject, and their negative forms by adding not after the verb (could I ...? I could not ...)
A finite verb has a subject (express or implied) and can function as the root of an independent
clause—one that can stand alone as a simple sentence and which, therefore, has subject and
predicate. In English there must be just one finite verb at the root of each clause. Examples
(finite, non-finite); the second example has one finite but many non-finite verbs. [I promise to do
my homework.] ]He was believed to have been told to have himself examined.]
A non-finite verb is one that is not finite; primary cases are infinitives, participles, and gerunds.
Infinitives—the base form of the verb, with or without introduction by the particle ‘to’, used as a
non-finite verb; examples: [I want to sit here.] [I sit here.] These are non finite because ‘to sit
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here’ and ‘sit here’ (as used) are not independent clauses; the to sit form is the full infinitive and
the sit form is the bare infinitive. A participle modifies a noun (phrase), e.g., for the infinitive to
open: [The flower is opening up.] [The flower has opened up.] [The flower has been opened up.]
are examples progressive active, perfect active, and passive participles respectively. A gerund is
verb form that appears in positions usually occupied by nouns; in English a gerund has the same
form as a progressive action participle; examples for the infinitive to open: [Opening books is
exciting.] [I enjoy opening books.] [I am better than most at opening safes.] are examples of
gerund as subject, object, and object of a preposition respectively.
Verb phrases
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb phrase
(although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar). A verb phrase headed by
a finite verb may also be called a predicate.
Adjectives
An adjective is a ‘describing word’ whose main function is to qualify a noun or noun phrase.
They cannot in general be identified by their form but often end with suffixes ‘al’, ‘ful’, ‘ic’, ‘ish’
and ‘ous’; or from other adjectives by a prefix: disloyal, unforgotten, irredeemable, overtired.
Adjectives can be used attributively [the big house] or predicatively [the house is big]. Some
adjectives are restricted to one use or the other: [the drunken sailor] and [the sailor was drunk].
Comparison
Many adjectives have comparative and superlative forms.
Adjective phrases
An adjective phrase usually has a single adjective as its head, to which modifiers and
complements are added. Modifiers can be preceding adverb or adverb phrases [very warm; more
than a little excited] or noun or quantitative phrases [fat-free, two-meter-long].
Complements may be prepositional phrases [angry at the scene], infinitive phrases [easy to pick
up], content clauses [unsure where I am], phrases or clauses with ‘than’ after comparatives
[smaller than I had imagined].
Some adjective phrases are formed entirely from non adjectives: [two-bedroom house], [a nojeans policy].
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Adverbs
Adverbs modify verbs and verb phrases. Right? No!. That’s not the whole truth. Adverbs can
modify just about anything. And they can indicate relationships between clauses and sentences.
Roughly, adverbs are words that modify verbs and words that do not fall under any other part of
speech.
There is a ‘logical’ approach that asks what function does a certain position in a sentence
perform? I’m not going to take this up; others have; the outcome is, no doubt, at most partial
order.
Not
Grammarians have difficulty classifying ‘not’. It may be its own category.
One approach to ‘not’ might be to recognize that when I say ‘The sun is shining.’ in declarative
mood, it is implicit that I assert the truth of the sentence. Putting ‘Not’ in front of the declarative
sentence says explicitly that I declare falsity of the sentence. Thus, does not ‘not’, in that
function, have an necessarily semantic role?
Adverb phrases
An adverb phrase is a phrase that acts as a adverb in a sentence. One kind has an adverb head and
modifiers and complements. Another kind is the prepositional phrase which consists of a
preposition and its object, e.g. [in the pool, after two years].
Prepositions
A preposition is a word that characteristically expresses spatial, or temporal relations. Common
English prepositions are: of, in, on, over, under, to, from, with, in front of, behind, opposite, by,
before, after, during, through, in spite of or despite, between, and among,
Conjunctions
Conjunctions express a variety of logical relations between items, phrases, clauses and sentences.
The principal coordinating conjunctions in English are and, or, and but, as well as nor, so, yet
and for.
There are also correlative conjunctions, where as well as the basic conjunction, an additional
element appears before the first of the items being linked. An example is either … or.
Subordinating conjunctions make relations between clauses, making the clause in which they
appear into a subordinate clause. Example: [I went to work because I need money.]
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Copula
A copula in a sentence or independent clause links subject to predicate (a subject complement).
Examples: [The sky is blue.]
The English copular verb be has eight forms (more than any other English verb): be, am, is, are,
being, was, were, been. Additional archaic forms include art, wast, wert, and occasionally beest
(as a subjunctive)
CLAUSES AND SENTENCES
A simple sentence contains a subject and a predicate; it makes sense by itself. A standard form is
SVO—subject, verb, object—e.g., The boy hit the ball. The subject is ‘The boy’, the verb is ‘hit’
and the object is ‘the ball’. The predicate is ‘hit the ball’—the verb phrase; it predicates the
subject.
A typical sentence contains one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses; sentences
may also be formed by linking sentences together using coordinating conjunctions. An
independent clause can stand by itself as a sentence. Consider the example [I enjoyed the movie
more than my friend did.] ‘I enjoyed the movie’ is the independent or main clause. ‘than my
friend did’ is a dependent or subordinate clause—i.e., it augments the independent clause and it
cannot stand by itself. A dependent clause is introduced by a dependent word, in this example a
subordinating conjunction than which introduces the adverb clause ‘than my friend did’ which
modifies the adverb more. A subordinating conjunction can introduce a noun clause, e.g. [I know
that he likes me.].
Another type of dependent word is the dependent pronoun. Relative pronouns begin dependent
clauses called relative clauses (these are a kind of dependent clause). E.g. [The only one of the
seven dwarfs who does not have a beard is Dopey.] where the relative clause ‘who does not
have a beard’ describes the pronoun ‘one’.
There is more to this but this is enough for my present purpose.
OTHER MATTERS
This document is a simple resource to some standard issues. I’m not concerned about things such
as:
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Prescriptive versus descriptive grammar
Prescriptive grammar is, roughly, what we were taught in school—this is how it should be
even though it does not always satisfy the needs of description and even where
convention has it stand over the needs of description.
Descriptive grammar has two concerns (a) what people say and (b) what elements of
speech are necessary (and sufficient) to convey meaning (usually literal).
An example
The phrases ‘0.25 miles’, ‘2 miles’, ‘a quarter of a mile’, and ‘one mile’ all sound right.
If the function of mile versus miles is to determine singular vs. plural, then why ‘0.25 miles’?
Another function of the ‘plural’ form is to distinguish part and whole. But this is not done
consistently.
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