Related Research Articles
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domains such as phonology, morphology, and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are currently two different approaches to the study of grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers, which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs and themselves, is an epicene (gender-neutral) third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent, in sentences such as:
A split infinitive is a grammatical construction in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the full infinitive, but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive. In the history of English language aesthetics, the split infinitive was often deprecated, despite its prevalence in colloquial speech. The opening sequence of the Star Trek television series contains a well-known example, "to boldly go where no man has gone before", wherein the adverb boldly was said to split the full infinitive, to go. Multiple words may split a to-infinitive, such as: "The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years."
The Elements of Style is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called Strunk & White, which Time named in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions, are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles.
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects, and so forth. Disputes may arise when style guides disagree with each other, or when a guideline or judgement is confronted by large amounts of conflicting evidence or has its rationale challenged.
In written English usage, a comma splice or comma fault is the use of a comma to join two independent clauses. For example:
It is nearly half past five, we cannot reach town before dark.
Geoffrey Keith Pullum is a British-American linguist specialising in the study of English. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Englishauxiliary verbs are a small set of English verbs, which include the English modal verbs and a few others. Although definitions vary, as generally conceived an auxiliary lacks inherent semantic meaning but instead modifies the meaning of another verb it accompanies. In English, verb forms are often classed as auxiliary on the basis of certain grammatical properties, particularly as regards their syntax. They also participate in subject–auxiliary inversion and negation by the simple addition of not after them.
The Englishpersonal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and natural gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
Relative clauses in the English language are formed principally by means of relative pronouns. The basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Various grammatical rules and style guides determine which relative pronouns may be suitable in various situations, especially for formal settings. In some cases the relative pronoun may be omitted and merely implied.
Syntactic Structures is an influential work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. It is an elaboration of his teacher Zellig Harris's model of transformational generative grammar. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, Chomsky's presentation is recognized as one of the most significant studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning. Thus, Chomsky argued for the independence of syntax from semantics.
Historically, grammarians have described preposition stranding or P-stranding as the syntactic construction in which a so-called stranded, hanging or dangling preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its corresponding object; for example, at the end of a sentence. The term preposition stranding was coined in 1964, predated by stranded preposition in 1949, Linguists had previously identified such a construction as a sentence-terminal preposition or as a preposition at the end. This kind of construction is found in English, and more generally in other Germanic languages.
Oliver Kamm is a British journalist and writer who is a leader writer and columnist for The Times.
In English, the subjunctive mood is a grammatical construction recognizable by its use of the bare form of a verb in a finite clause that describes a non-actual scenario. For instance, "It's essential that he be here" uses subjunctive mood while "It's essential that he is here" does not. In contrast to many other languages, English does not have a specifically subjunctive verb form. Rather, subjunctive clauses recruit the bare form of the verb which is also used in a variety of other constructions such as imperatives and infinitives. Thus, linguists regard the English subjunctive as syntactic rather than inflectional.
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated from Anglia, a peninsula on the Baltic Sea, to the area of Great Britain later named after them: England. The closest living relatives of English include Scots, followed by the Low Saxon and Frisian languages. While English is genealogically West Germanic, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by Old Norman French and Latin, as well as by Old Norse. Speakers of English are called Anglophones.
The history of English grammars begins late in the sixteenth century with the Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar. In the early works, the structure and rules of English grammar were based on those of Latin. A more modern approach, incorporating phonology, was introduced in the nineteenth century.
Comprised of is an expression in English that means "composed of" or "constituted by". The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionaries regard the form comprised of as standard English usage.
The inanimate whose refers to the use in English of the relative pronoun whose with non-personal antecedents, as in: "That's the car whose alarm keeps waking us up at night." The construction is also known as the whose inanimate, non-personal whose, and neuter whose.
References
- ↑ Andrew Marszal (15 April 2013). "Good grammar test: can you pass?". The Telegraph. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ "Nevile Martin Gwynne". Archived from the original on 18 December 2014. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Gwynne's Grammar, front cover.
- ↑ Gwynne's Grammar, p. 11
- ↑ Gwynne's Grammar, pp 44–46
- ↑ Gwynne's Grammar, p. 46
- ↑ Gwynne's Grammar, p. 48
- ↑ "Gove grovels to Gwynne' Grammar". London Evening Standard. 1 July 2013. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Michael Rosen (2 March 2012). "Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar'". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Geoffrey K. Pullum (26 May 2013). "Hopefully no need to comment". Language Log. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Tom Chivers (20 March 2014). "Are the 'grammar police' ruining the English language?". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Kamm, Oliver Accidence Will Happen: the Non-Pedantic Guide to English, W&N, 2015 paperback edition, p. 109.
- ↑ "There's no grammatical objection to split infinitives", Oliver Kamm, The Times, 14 January 2017, p. 79.
- ↑ Gwynne's Latin, front cover.
- ↑ Britt Peterson (31 August 2014). "Why we love the language police". Boston Globe. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Gwynne's Latin, p. 2
- ↑ Gwynne's Latin, p. 8
- ↑ Gwynne's Latin, p. 19
- ↑ Harry Mount (3 May 2014). "To be topp at lat., throw your Cambridge Latin Course away". The Spectator. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Daniel Hahn (20 April 2014). "Book review: Gwynne's Latin By N M Gwynne" . The Independent. Archived from the original on 18 June 2022. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
- ↑ Ross McGuinness (11 April 2014). "Carpe diem, innit: Can Latin seize the day for a new generation of students?". Metro. Retrieved 9 November 2016.