Hello,
Please feel to read the notes on Lesson 1 3rd december 2008
See you soon
Philip
Linguistics : Word Class
About English by Catherine Riley
Chapter 3
Please do the exercises suggested in the book from page 79-89
3.1 Categories and Classes: parts of speech
3.2 Bricks and Mortar: content words and function words
3.3 The Bricks: content words
3.4 The Name’s the Game: nouns
3.5 What’s it like: adjectives
3.6 Getting things done: verbs
3.1 The parts of speech (word class) that are used to describe English words are:
• Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
(Pronouns)
Prepositions
Conjunctions
Articles
3.2 Content words or Lexical words
Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs
• Functional words
Prepositions Conjunctions Articles
Closed class of words
3.4 A noun is often defined as a word which names a person, place or thing.
Here are some examples of nouns: teacher, river, friend, Sicily, triangle, day, school, truth, university, idea, Obama, aunt, vacation, eye, dream, flag, teacher, class, grammar.
Barrack Obama is a noun because it is the name of a person; Ragusa is a noun because it is the name of a place; and desk is a noun because it is the name of a thing.
• Grammar books divide nouns into 2 groups.
• Proper nouns are nouns which begin with a capital letter because it is the name of a specific or particular person place or thing. Some examples of proper nouns are: Italy, Massimo Sturiale, Mediterranean Sea, December, Wednesday, Peterborough, Linda, Oxford Street, Burger King. If you see a word beginning with a capital letter in in the middle of a sentence, it is probably a proper noun.
• Most nouns are common nouns and do not begin with a capital letter.
• Many nouns have a special plural form if there is more than one. For example, we say one book but two books. Plurals are usually formed by adding an -s (books) or -es (boxes) but some plurals are formed in different ways (child – children, person – people, mouse – mice, sheep – sheep). We added man – men woman – women.
We will do more on this
• Collective noun (p.83)
• Quantifying noun
• Unit noun
• Compound noun (p.84)
• Attributive noun (nouns as modifiers)
3.5 What’s it like: adjectives
• An adjective is often defined as a word which describes or gives more information about a noun or pronoun. Adjectives describe nouns in terms of such qualities as size, colour, number, and kind.
• In the sentence ‘The lazy student sat on the rug’, the word lazy is an adjective which gives more information about the noun student. We can add more adjectives to describe the student as well. The lazy, young, language student sat on the rug.
• We can also add adjectives to describe the rug as in the sentence The lazy, young, language student sat on the beautiful, expensive, new rug. The adjectives do not change the basic meaning or structure of the sentence, but they do give a lot more information about the student and the rug. As you can see in the example above, when more than one adjective is used, a comma (,) is used between the adjectives.
Usually an adjective comes before the noun that it describes, as in plump man. It can also come after a form of the word beas in The man is plump. More than one adjective can be used in this position in the sentence The man is tall, dark and handsome. The Englishman is blond.
Most adjectives do not change form whether the noun it describes is singular or plural. For example we say big books and big books, old house and old houses, good time and good times. There are, however, some adjectives that do have different singular andplural forms. The common words this and that have the plural forms these and those. These words are called demonstrative adjectives because demonstrate or point out what is being referred to.
Another common type of adjective is the possessive adjective which shows possession or ownership. The words my dog or my dogs indicate that the dog or dogs belong to me. I would use the plural form our if the dog or dogs belonged to me and other people.
3.6 Getting things done: verbs
• A verb is often defined as a word which shows action or state of being. The verb is the heart of a sentence – every sentence must have a verb.
• Recognizing the verb is often the most important step in understanding the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence The dog bit the man, bit is the verb and the word which shows the action of the sentence.
• In the sentence The man is sitting on a chair, even though the action doesn’t show much activity, sitting is the verb of the sentence.
• In the sentence She is a smart girl, there is no action but a state of being expressed by the verb is. The word be is different from other verbs in many ways but can still be thought of as a verb.
• Unlike most of the other parts of speech, verbs change their form. Sometimes endings are added (learn – learned) and sometimes the word itself becomes different (teach-taught).
• The different forms of verbs show different meanings related to such things as tense (past, present, future), person (first person, second person, third person), number (singular, plural) and voice (active, passive).
• Verbs are also often accompanied by verb-like words called modals (may, could, should, etc.) and auxiliaries(do, have, will, etc.) to give them different meanings.
• One of the most important things about verbs is their relationship to time.
• Verbs tell if something has already happened, if it will happen later, or if it is happening now.
• For things happening now, we use the present tense of a verb;
• for something that has already happened, we use the past tense;
• and for something that will happen later, we use the future tense.
On Friday we will also talk about adverbs
• We have seen that an adjective is a word that gives more information about a noun or pronoun. An adverb is usually defined as a word that gives more information about a verb, an adjective or another adverb. Adverbs describe verbs, adjectives and adverbs in terms of such qualities as time, frequency and manner. In the sentence Sue runs fast, fast describes how or the manner in which Sue runs. In the sentence Sue runs very fast, very describes the adverb fast and gives information about how fast Sue runs.
• Most, but not all adverbs end in -ly as in But not all words that end in -ly are adverbs (ugly is an adjective, supply and reply can both be nouns or verbs). Many times an adjective can be made into an adverb by adding -ly as in nicely, quickly, completely, sincerely.
• Adverbs of time tell when something happens and adverbs of frequency tell how often something happens.
