Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Grammar
Grammar in the simplest sense is a set of rules, which people are supposed to follow
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Grammar can also be described as the anatomy and physiology of language; we might
dissect it to study it further
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A descriptive approach involves
observing what is done, without necessarily saying whether it is correct or incorrect
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Incorrect Language:
 Double negatives are considered incorrect, such as ‘I didn’t do nothing’
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’
 Double superlatives are also incorrect
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g
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By not splitting the infinitive in this case, the writer created an ambiguous
meaning
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But
Latin is a completely different language; in English, we would have two words; ‘to go’
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M
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Organisation of Language:
Grammar is a way of describing
relations between words
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Here is a list of
word forms
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Here is a
reorganisation of
those eight yellow
categories
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g
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Next to that
is the closed class;
there is a limited range
of pronouns, for
example
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They are additions to the pronoun set, which is a rare occurrence, but can sometimes happen
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Typically, in
primary schools, words
are described in a
notional manner, such
as ‘adjectives are
describing words’
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But of course, there’s a slight problem, if one said ‘the sun
is yellow’
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Notional criteria does not distinguish, for example, the two types of verb, dynamic and stative
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But of course English has a few
exceptions, such as ‘mouse’
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Both
notional and formal features, then, are useful, but not perfect
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‘Banana’ usually has ‘a’ pre-modifying
it, or ‘the’
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Creating words:
Some writers create words
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‘Brillig’ would be an adjective, identified through the pre-modifier ‘twas’
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This identification would be a study of
the distributional features
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Another example would be to ‘send an email to a friend’, when now one would say,
‘email a friend’
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Phrases and Clauses:
What’s the difference between a phrase and a clause? Some titles of books:
 The Mill on the Floss (P)
 Mr Norris Changes Trains (C)
 One Flew Over the cuckoo’s nest (C)
 The Bone Clocks (P)
 A Tale of Two Cities (P)
 He Knew He Was Right (C)
All those marked ‘(P)’ are noun phrases
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With the title ‘The Mill on the Floss’, you
cannot make a tag question with the title alone
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Clauses are called so because they include a main verb, and usually a subject
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There are many different types of
phrase:

A statement:
‘Naomie
Harris is
Moneypenny
in the new
007 film
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‘Naomie
Harris’ can be
replaced by
the pronoun
‘she’, so
‘Naomie Harris’ is a noun phrase
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’ Phrases can also be moved: ‘In the new 007 film, Naomie
Harris is Moneypenny’
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For example, ‘oil floats’ is a
clause; ‘oil’ being the noun, and ‘floats’ is the verb
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 ‘The dog had bitten the man and had chased the cat down the road
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That in green indicates a verb phrase, and the rest (generally) is noun phrases:
 ‘Ruth and Gareth bought a three-bedroom house in West Sussex
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Modal auxiliary verbs are slightly more tentative, a particular kind of auxiliary verb
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 ‘None of the volunteers experienced a miraculous resurrection to good health
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Another way of looking at the relationships between parts of a clause is by exploring their
differing functions, using ‘SPOCA’
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In the structure of a clause is always a predicator, the verb, which is necessary to
create a clause (as aforementioned)
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Subject:

 ‘Ruth and Gareth bought a three-bedroom house in West Sussex
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,
which is described by the predicator
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Object is an element experiencing the direct action described by the predicator
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 ‘My son has made me a grandfather
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A copular verb is ‘to be’,
or something similar (typically, the predicator will be the verb ‘to be’)
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Adjunct:
 ‘The dog had bitten the man and had chased the cat down the road
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of the
action, process, relationship etc
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Adjuncts answer questions, such
as how? When? Why?
Adjunct is typically placed after the verb, but obviously can be found in different places
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Sambo, sambo, he’s crying now
I (S) knee (P) him (O) in the balls (A)
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Sentences and Clauses:
A sentence consists of one (simple sentence) or more (complex or compound) free clauses
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For
example:
‘The dog had bitten the man and had chased the cat down the road
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


Compound: two or more clauses that are in a symmetrical relationship and tend to be
linked with coordinating conjunctions
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Within this sentence type is either a subordinate clause (where
one is subordinate to the other) or embedded clause (where one clause is inside a larger
clause, embedded)
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

That highlighted in purple is the main proposition, and then more is added, in a ‘trailing’
of information
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Anticipatory constituents:
´On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes…To the left a group of barren
islets…And when I turned my head…’
Anticipatory constituents are far rarer
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This gives a kind of controlling perspective to the writing
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Often, by the time the end of the sentence is reached, the main
proposition can be forgotten!



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