Scores
1. a=1 b=2 c=3 d=4 2. a=2 b=3 c=2 3. a=1 b=1 c=2 d=2 e=3 4. a=3 b=2 c=1 d=1 e=2 5. a=3 b=2 c=2
6. a=4 b=3 c=2 d=1 7. a=1 b=2 c=3 8. a=4 b=2 c= 1 9. a=3 b=2 c=1 d=0 10. a= -1 b=3 c=1
11. A=3 b=0 c=1 12. a=-1 b=0 c=1 d=3 13. a=4 b=3 c=2 d=0 14. a=4 b=3 c=2 d=0

Interpretation of your score

47-44 Romeo/ Juliet. You are ultra-romantic. Your head is in the clouds. Love is the most important thing in your life. You think about love far too much, be careful !
43-38 You are very romantic. Romance is an important part of your life. Perhaps there is a fairy tale marriage written in your stars. But make the right choice. Don’t accept the first partner you find.
37-32 You are romantic. You have a good healthy attitude towards love. You will probably have a happy life with the partner you choose
31-26 You are modern and realistic. You can be romantic at times but you are a realist in you daily life. You see love as a normal consequence of life. Marriage for you is not mystical.
25-21 Practical/Down to earth. You have rather a practical view about love and relationships. Perhaps it would be good for you to be a little more romantic at times. Make an effort !
20-13 Unromantic. You are a rather prosaic in your attitude to romance. Perhaps you have had a disappointment and you have become a bit too cynical. Try to see love and life more positively. Go and watch a romantic film !
12-8 You are a STONE !

www.facebook.com/people/Philip-Drury/1069852502″ title=”Philip Drury’s Facebook profile” target=_TOP><img src=”http://badge.facebook.com/badge/1069852502.199.727729042.png” border=0 alt=”Philip Drury’s Facebook prof

Please feel free to write a comment.

Best wishes

Philip

Here is the content of the second lesson at Ragusa.

Lesson 2 Ragusa 5^th December 2008

From Verbs to Adverbs

Corresponding to About English by Catherine Riley Chapter 3

Chapter 3 Verbs (3.6 p. 91) and next time ….. Adverbs (3.7 p.99)

• 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.

• There are different kinds of verbs, two groups of which, auxiliary verbs and modals are function words and are dealt with in 3.14

• All other verbs are known as lexical verbs or main verbs (p.91)

Examples in a table:

There are many ways of classifying verbs.

• Verbs of : activity, communication, mental, causative, occurence, existence or relationship, aspect (Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English in Riley Ref. P.91)

• Verbs can be grouped according to transitivity patterns

• According to form: one-word verbs, multi-word verbs, compound verbs,

• Regular and irregular verbs

• Reflexive, reciprocal and ergative verbs

• Whether followed by a bare or full infinitive (p.92)

Most common lexical verbs

45% in conversation !

• Activity verbs: get (2), go (3) make (7), come (8) take (9) give (11)

• Mental know (4), think (5), see (6), want (10), mean (12)

• Communicative: say(1)

• There are 4,500 occurences of the verb say in each million words of English (p.92)

Delexical Verbs

• 3 of the 6 most commonly occurring activity verbs in spoken English

• make, take, and give are often used as delexical verbs – a group of verbs whose own lexical meaning is very weak when used with certain nouns like

• make a mistake,

• take a photograph

Copular (link) Verbs

• Get and go are aften used as copular (link) verbs in many phrases.

• Example: In winter, even in Sicily it gets dark at about 5.30.

• My father is going deaf, the fans went mad when they saw the pop star

Transitivity

• Certain verbs ,must be accompanied by a direct object

• i.e. they are transitive

• The direct object must come directly after the verb

• N.B. Word order is much stricter in English than in Italian. Knowing about word classes should also include their position in a sentence. (p.93)

Examples

• In the sentence ‘The dog bit the teacher’, bit is the verb and the word which shows the action of the sentence.

• In the sentence : ‘The Ragusa language student is sitting on a chair’, even though the action doesn’t show much activity, sitting is the verb of the sentence.

• In the sentence ‘Jo 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

Tense/person/number/voice

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)

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.

• Verbs like those in the chart above that form the past tense by adding -d or -ed are called regular verbs.

• Some of the most common verbs are not regular and the different forms of the verb must be learned.

• There are a large but limited number of irregular verbs

Not only are there the simple tenses of the verbs.

• There are also progressive or continuous forms which show that the action takes place over a period of time, and perfect forms which show completion of the action.

• Simple present tense verbs have a special form for the third person singular. Singular means “one” and plural means “more than one.”  Person is used here to show who or what does the action and can have the following forms:
1st person or the self (I, we)
2nd person or the person spoken to (you)
3rd person or a person not present (he, she, it, they)
The third person singular forms are represented by the pronouns he, she, it.

A verb must “agree” with its subject. Subject-verb agreement generally means that  the third person singular verb form must be used with a third person subject in the simple present tense.

The  word be – the most irregular and also most common verb in English – has different forms for each person and even for the simple past tense.

English is an S V O language

• Almost always in the affirmative a subject comes before a verb and an object may come after it.

• The subject is what does the action of the verb and the object is what receives the action.

• In the sentence Bob ate a humburger, Bob is the subject or the one who did the eating and the hamburger is the object or what got eaten.

• A verb which has an object is called a transitive verb and some examples are throw, buy, hit, love.

• A verb which has no object is called an intransitive verb and some examples are go, come, walk, listen.

• Verbs are often made up of more than one word.

• The future forms, for example, use the word will and the perfect forms use the word have. These words are called helping or auxiliary verbs.

• The word be can serve as an auxiliary and will and shall are also auxiliary forms.

• There is a type of auxiliary verb called a modal which changes the meaning of a verb in different ways.

• Words like can, should, would, may, might, and must are modals and are covered in other lessons.

• Later we will also look at Phrasal Verbs

Best wishes

Philip

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.

Please look at our PowerPoint and give us some feedback.

Best wishes

Teaching Team

Here is the Powerpoint File.

I hope you enjoyed the meeting with the interactive whiteboard.

Best wishes

Philip

http://www.formare.erickson.it/archivio/febbraio_07/4_DRURY.html

http://lnx.forcoop.net/esperidi/course/view.php?id=42

http://www.ild.rai.it/

http://www.oup.com/elt/

I wish you a happy and sucessful 2008!

Best wishes

Philip

5th year students Maria Ausiliatrice

You need to write the introduction to your project in English.

It should be about one page. You could use this a model:

Title:

 My project is about …….. and centres around (materia) however it has links to (……)I chose this topic because I was very interested in …… especially ……The most interesting things to say about the contents are:1)2)3)4)By doing this project I learned a lot about …. and … I also learned how to do original research and to make a bibliography.