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English grammar is a body of rules specifying how meanings are created in and Description ). No human language's grammar has been fully mapped out. That is, no set of unambiguous rules has been formulated that will always or almost always agree with native speakers on whether any given sentence is grammatical or not. (This is evidenced by the generally poor performance of automated Grammar Checker s and so on.) The development of a complete grammar is an important goal of Natural Language Processing . The remainder of this article deals with English grammar as viewed from a Linguistic perspective. Therefore, the issues addressed deal mainly with the grammars of natural dialects of everyday speech rather than those of formal writing. Issues common to all languages are not stressed here. WORD ORDER English is a Subject Verb Object (SVO) language: it prefers a sequence of subject–verb–object in its simplest, unmarked declarative statements. Thus "Tom eats [verb cheese [object]" and "Mary sees the cat." However, beyond these simple examples, word order is a complicated matter in English. In particular, the speaker or writer's point of departure in each clause is a key factor in the organization of the message. Thus, the elements in a message can be ordered in a way that signals to the reader or listener what the message concerns.
The point of departure can also be set up as an equation, known as a thematic equative. In this way, virtually any element in a clause can be put first.
Usually, the point of departure is the subject of a declarative Clause ; this is the ''unmarked'' form. A point of departure is ''marked'' when it is not the subject—thus, occasionally it is the object ("''You'' I blame for this dilemma") and more often an adverbial phrase ("''This morning'' I got up late"). In questions, point of departure is treated slightly differently. Unmarked questions start with the word that indicates what the speaker wants to know.
Marked questions displace this key "what I want to know" word with some other element.
Imperative clauses are either of the type "I want you to do something" or "I want you and me to do something." The second type usually starts with ''let's''; in the unmarked form of the first type, ''you'' is implied and not made explicit ("Improve your grammar!"), and included in the marked form ("You improve your grammar!"); another marked form is "Do improve your grammar." In the negative, "Don't argue with me" is unmarked, and "Don't you argue with me" is marked. In spoken English, the point of departure is frequently marked off by intonation. Generally, English is a ''head-initial'' language, meaning that the "anchor" of a phrase (segment of a Sentence ) occurs at the beginning of the phrase.
The main exception is that simple modifiers precede the Noun Phrase s:
This leads to a sentence like: "Fred's sister ran quickly to the store." As can be inferred from this example, the sequence of a basic sentence (ignoring Article s and other Determiner s as well as prepositional phrases) is: Adjective1 - Subject - Verb - Adverb - Adjective2 - Indirect Object - Adjective3 - Direct Object. Interrogative sentences invert word order ("Did you go to the store?"). Changing a given sentence from active to passive Grammatical Voice changes the word order, moving the new subject to the front ("John bought the car" becomes "The car was bought by John"), and lexical or grammatical emphasis (topicalization) changes it in many cases as well (see duke-aunt-teapot examples above). English also sees some use of the OSV (object-subject-verb) word order, especially when making comparisons using pronouns that are marked for case. For example "I hate oranges, but apples I'll eat." Far more rare, but still sometimes used is OVS, "If it's apples you like, then apples like I," although this last usage can sound contrived and anachronistic to a native speaker. NOUNS In English, nouns generally describe persons, places, things, and abstract ideas, and are treated as grammatically distinct from verbs. English nouns, in general, are not marked for Case or gender, but are marked for number and definiteness. Gender See Also: Gender in English A remnant of grammatical gender is also preserved in the third person pronouns. Gender is assigned to animate objects based on biological gender (where known), and to personified objects based on social conventions (ships, for example, are often regarded as feminine in English). ''He'' is used for masculine nouns; ''she'' is used for feminine nouns; and ''it'' is used for nouns of indeterminate gender and inanimate objects. The use of ''it'' to refer to humans is generally considered ungrammatical and impolite. Traditionally, the masculine ''he'' was used to refer to a person in the third person whose gender was unknown or irrelevant to the context; recently, this usage has come under criticism for supporting gender-based stereotypes and is increasingly considered inappropriate (see Gender-neutral Language ). There is no consensus on a replacement. Some English speakers prefer to use the slightly cumbersome "he or she" or "s/he", others prefer the use of ''they'' (3rd plural) (see Singular They ). This situation rarely leads to confusion, since the intended meaning can be inferred from context, though it still is considered by most to be incorrect grammar. Spivak Pronouns have also been proposed which are essentially formed by dropping the leading <th> from the plural counterpart, but their use is relatively rare compared to other solutions. For comparison, speakers of German distinguish between the homophonous ''sie'' ("she"), ''sie'' ("they"), and ''Sie'' ("you", polite) with little difficulty. The categorization of nouns is typically expressed by one or more of the elements called ''deictic'', ''numerative'', ''epithet'', and ''classifier''. We shall consider each of these in turn. Deixis The deictic element indicates whether or not a specific subset of a noun is intended; and if so, which subset. A deictic is either (i) specific or (ii) non-specific. The specific deictics are given in the following table. The subset in question is specified by one of two possible deictic features: either
together with the possibility of an interrogative in both of these categories (demonstrative "which?" and possessive "whose?"). All of these have the function of identifying a particular subset of the noun that is being referred to. "Proximity to the speaker" refers not only to physical distance, but also to temporal; deictics orient the listener to the 'speaker-now', the temporal–modal complex that constitutes the point of reference of the speech event. So, "this tragedy" refers to one that is current or recent and/or is or was geographically close to the speaker, whereas "that tragedy" refers to one that occurred in the past and/or was less geographically close. There is one more item in this class, namely "the". The word "the" is a specific, determinative deictic of a peculiar kind: it means "the subset in question is identifiable; but this will not tell you how to identify it—the information is somewhere around, where you can recover it"; typically, the listener/reader can recover the information from assumed general knowledge, the specific context, or from a specific and recent point in the text. So whereas "this train" means "you know which train: the one near me", and "my train" means "you know which train: the one I own", "the train" means simply "you know which train." Hence "the" is usually accompanied by some other element that supplies the information required: for example, "the long train" means "you know which train: you can tell it by its length." Non-specific deictics convey the sense of all, or none, or some unspecified subset. The main categories and main items in each are as follow. (a) Total
(b) Partial
There are two systems of number for English nouns, one associated with each of the two kinds of deictics. (i) With specific deictics, the number system is ''non-plural versus plural''; mass nouns are grouped together with singular, in a category of ''non-plural''. So "this" and "that" go with non-plural (singular or mass), and "these" and "those" go with plural. For example, for non-plural nouns, singular might be "this train" (plural "these trains") and mass might be "this electricity" (no plural equivalent). (ii) With non-specific deictics, the system is ''singular versus non-singular''. So "a" and "an" go with singular, and weak "some" with non-singular (mass or plural). For example, "a train" is singular (plural "trains" or "some trains"); non-singular mass ("electricity" or "some electricity" has no singular equivalent). If there is no deictic element, the noun is non-specific and, within that, non-singular. In other words, a noun may have no deictic element in its ''structure'', but this does not mean that it has no value in the deictic "system", but simply that the value selected is realized by a form having no deictic in the expression. Number See Also: English plural English nouns are typically inflected for Number , having distinct ''singular'' and '' Plural '' forms. The plural form usually consists of the singular form plus ''-s'' or ''-es'', but there are many irregular nouns. Ordinarily, the singular form is used when discussing one instance of the noun's referent, and the plural form is used when discussing any other number of instances, but there are many exceptions to this rule. Examples include:
Articles A Definite Article such as "the" is used to refer to a specific instance of the noun, often already mentioned in the context or easy to identify. Definite articles are slightly different from demonstratives, which often indicate the location of nouns with respect to the speaker and audience.
An Indefinite Article such as "a" or "an" is used to refer to a generic instance of the noun. Note that "a" is used when preceding a noun beginning with a Consonant sound, whereas "an" is used when preceding a noun beginning with a Vowel sound.
Case Historically, English used to mark nouns for Case , and the two remnants of this case marking are the Pronominal system and the possessive Clitic (which used to be called the '' Saxon Genitive ''). The possessive is marked by a clitic at the end of the possessing Noun Phrase . This can be illustrated in the following manner: :The king's daughter's house fell. The first <'s> clitic on ''king'' indicates that the daughter in question is the king's. The second <'s> clitic does not attach to ''daughter'', as many people mistakenly believe, but in fact to the entire noun phrase ''The king's daughter''. English preserves the old Germanic noun case system in its pronouns. Their forms vary with Gender , Number , Person , and Case . The full set of cases is listed below; note that modern use of the second person singular '' Thou '', originally the informal form to the formal ''you'', is very rare, and is confined to Dialect s and religious and poetic functions. In modern Standard English, the second person plural ''you'' is used instead. ;Notes #Some dialects use different forms for the second person plural pronoun: they include ''you-all'' or '' Y'all '' ''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Fourth Edition. See http://www.bartleby.com/61/66/Y0026600.html ., ''you guys'', ''yu'uns'' ''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Fourth Edition. See http://www.bartleby.com/61/94/Y0029450.html ., ''youse'' ''The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language'', Fourth Edition. See http://www.bartleby.com/61/91/Y0029150.html ., or ''ye'' ''Dictionary of Newfoundland English''. See http://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/azindex/pages/5505.html .. These forms are generally regarded as colloquial and non-standard. #The pronoun '' Thou '' was the former second person singular pronoun; it is considered an Archaism in most contexts, although it is still used in some Dialect s in the north of England. #''Mine'' (and ''thine'') were also previously used before vowel sounds to avoid a Glottal Stop . e.g., "Do mine eyes deceive me?", "Know thine enemy." This usage is now archaic. #''Whom'' is often replaced with ''who''. See English Personal Pronouns , for further information. Nouns as other parts of speech Nouns can also be used as verbs, as in "verbing weirds language", or as adjectives, as in "mountain bike". See the following articles: VERBS See Also: English verbs Conjugation tables In English, verbs generally describe actions, and can also be used to describe certain states of being. In contrast to the relative simplicity of English nouns, verbs come in a large array of tenses, some moods, two voices, and are marked for person. Person Verbs in English are marked in limited fashion for person. Unlike some other European languages, person cannot generally be inferred from the conjugation attached to the verb. As a result, subject nouns and pronouns are generally required elements in English sentences for clarity's sake. Most regular verbs in English follow the paradigm exemplified below for the simple present of the verb "to listen": Note: an archaic version of the second person singular is "thou listenest", and of the third person singular "he/she/it listeneth". Tense Changes in tense in English are achieved by the changes in ending and the use of Auxiliary Verb s "to be" and "to have" and the use of the auxiliaries "will", "shall" and "would". (These auxiliaries cannot co-occur with other modals like ''can'', ''may'', and ''must''.) The examples below use the regular verb to listen:
Auxiliary verbs may be used to define tense, aspect, or mood of a verb phrase. As mentioned above " Going To " is used for some future pseudo-tenses: Forms of "do" are used for some negatives, questions and emphasis of the simple present and simple past: #"Do I listen?" "I do not listen." "I do listen!" #"Did I listen?" "I did not listen." "I did listen!" Voice See Also: English passive voice English has two voices for verbs: the active and the passive. The basic form is the active verb, and follows the SVO pattern discussed above. The passive voice is derived from the active by using the auxiliary verb "to be" and the past participle form of the main verb. Examples of the passive: Furthermore, the Agent and Patient switch grammatical roles between active and passive voices so that in passive the patient is the subject, and the agent is noted in an optional prepositional phrase using ''by'', for example: #active: ''I heard the music.'' #passive: ''The music was heard (by me).'' (Note: ''me'', not ''I'') The passive form of the verb is formed by replacing the verb with ''to be'' in the same tense and aspect, and appending the past participle of the original verb. Thus: This pattern continues through all the composite tenses as well. The semantic effect of the change from active to passive is the depersonalization of an action. It is also occasionally used to topicalize the direct object of a sentence, or when the agent is either unknown or unimportant even when included, thus: #The plane was shot down. #Dozens were killed. #Bill was run over by a bus. Many writing style guides including Strunk And White recommend minimizing use of the passive voice in English; however, many others do not. There is a third 'voice' in English, related to the classic "middle" voice. In this, the patient becomes the subject, as in passive, but the verb remains in apparently active voice, no agent can plausibly be supplied, and generally an adverbial modifies the entire construction. Thus: #She doesn't frighten easily. #This bread slices poorly. #His novels sell well. Mood English has "moods" of verb. These always include the declarative/indicative and the subjunctive moods, and normally the imperative is included as a mood. Some people include conditional or interrogative forms as verbal moods. Indicative, or declarative, mood
Examples are most commonly used verb forms, e.g.:
Subjunctive mood
The conjugation of these moods becomes a significantly more complex matter when they are used with different tenses. However, casual spoken English rarely uses the subjunctive, and generally restricts the conditional mood to the simple present and simple past. A notable exception to this is the use of the present subjunctive in clauses of wish or command which is marked in one or two ways: (1) if third person singular, the "-s" conjugation called for by the declarative mood is absent, and (2) past tense is not used. For example, "They insisted that he go to chapel every morning" means that they were requiring or demanding him to go to chapel. However, "They insisted that he went to chapel every morning" means they are reasserting the statement that, in the past, he did attend chapel every morning. The underlying grammar of this distinction has been called the "American subjunctive". On the other hand, other constructions for expressing wishes and commands, which do not use the subjunctive, are equally common, such as "They required him to go..." Imperative mood
Conditional forms Conditional forms of verb are used to express if-then statements, or in response to counterfactual propositions (see subjunctive mood, above), denoting or implying an indeterminate future action. Conditionals may be considered tense forms but are sometimes considered a verbal mood, the '' Conditional Mood ''. Conditionals are expressed through the use of the Verbal Auxiliaries ''could'', ''would'', ''should'', ''may'' and ''might'' in combination with the stem form of the verb. #He could go to the store. #You should be more careful. #I may try something else. #He might be heading north. Note that for many speakers, "may" and "might" have merged into a single meaning (that of "might") that implies the outcome of the statement is contingent. The implication of permission in "may" seems to remain only in certain uses with the second person, e.g. "You may leave the dinner table." Two main conditional tenses can be identified in English: I would think I would have thought Interrogative word order Interrogative word order is used to pose questions, with or without an expected answer. Most of the time, it is formed by switching the order of the subject and the auxiliary (or "helping") verb in a declarative sentence, as in the following: #Are you going to the party? #Is he supposed to do that? #How much do I owe you? #Where is the parking lot? However, when the information being requested would be the subject of the answer, the word order is not inverted, and the interrogative pronoun takes the place of the subject, as in the following: #Who helped you with your homework? #What happened here? When spoken, an Intonation change is often used so as to emphasize this switch, or can entirely reflect the interrogative mood in some cases (e.g. "John ran?"). The interrogative phrase can further be formed in this manner by moving the predicate of a declarative sentence in front of the helping verb and changing it to a demonstrative, relative pronoun, quantifier, etc. The interrogatives phrase is denoted by ending the sentence with a question mark . Rhetorical questions can be formed by moving the helping verb-subject pair to the end of the question, e.g. "You wouldn't really do that, would you?" Irregular verbs While many verbs in English follow the relatively simple paradigm illustrated at the beginning of this section, there are some verbs that do not. There are two categories of such verbs: # Strong Verbs (the "transparently irregular") #true irregular verbs. The term "transparently irregular" is sometimes used to describe Jacob Grimm 's "strong" verbs that appear irregular at first, but actually follow a common paradigm. This group of verbs is a relic of the older Germanic Ablaut system for conjugation. This is generally confined to atypical simple past verb forms, e.g.: :I swim ~ I swam ~ I have swum :I sing ~ I sang ~ I have sung :I steal ~ I stole ~ I have stolen Another category of "transparently irregular" verbs dates back to Middle English. Some verbs, especially those with a stem ending in an alveolar consonant (/t/, /d/, or /s/), formed a Geminate Consonant or consonant cluster with the -d suffix. In Middle English, vowels before a consonant cluster often became shorter. As the Great Vowel Shift obscured the connection between long vowels and the corresponding short vowels, transparent irregularities such as the following arose: :I meet ~ I met ~ I have met :I lead ~ I led ~ I have led :I read ~ I read ~ I have read :I lose ~ I lost ~ I have lost :I keep ~ I kept ~ I have kept True irregular verbs have forms that are not predictable from ablaut rules. The most common of these in English is the verb "to be." A sampling of its verbal paradigm is listed below; the majority of other forms are predictable from the knowledge of these four. Irregular verbs include ''eat'', ''sit'', ''lend'', and ''keep'', among many others. Some paradigms are based on obsolete root words, or roots that have changed meaning. Others are derived from old umlaut patterns that changes in Phonemic Structure and grammar have distorted (''keep ~ kept'' is one such example). Some are unclear in origin, and may date back to Proto-Indo-European times. Notes #In English, a long-standing prescriptive rule holds that ''shall'' denotes simple futurity in the first person, and ''will'' denotes simple futurity in the second and third persons. In American English, this distinction has largely vanished; ''will'' is normally used for both cases, and ''shall'' is rare. In British English, adherence to the rule has declined during the 20th Century (''see Shall And Will for a more detailed discussion''), although use of ''shall'' remains for expressing the simple future in the first person. #The distinction between tense, aspect, and mood is not clear-cut or universally agreed-upon. For example, many analysts would not accept that English has twelve tenses. The six "continuous" (also called "progressive") forms in the list above are often treated under the heading of " Aspect " rather than tense: the simple past and the past continuous are examples of the same tense, under this view. In addition, many modern grammars of English agree that English does not have a future tense (or a future perfect). These include the two largest and most sophisticated recent grammars: :#Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad & E. Finegan. 1999. ''Longman grammar of spoken and written English''. Harlow, Longman. :# Huddleston, R. & G. Pullum . 2002. ''The Cambridge grammar of the English language''. Cambridge, CUP. The main argument given by Huddleston and Pullum (pp 209-10) that English does not have a future tense is that "". Huddleston & Pullum, on the other hand, regard the forms with "have" as "secondary tenses". ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS Adjectives are modifiers for nouns and adverbs are modifiers for verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. Not all languages distinguish them, but English does in both grammar and word formation. Grammatically, adjectives ''precede'' the noun they modify, whereas adverbs might precede or follow the verb they modify, depending upon the specific adverb (although there are a small number of exceptions). English also has a means of converting adjectives into adverbs: the addition of the suffix <-ly> changes an adjective to an adverb (in addition to moving it to the appropriate place in a sentence). Occasionally, people use adverbs with verbs that require an adjective. #"I feel badly" - the speaker has an impaired sense of touch (likewise: "I hear badly") #"I feel bad" - the speaker is ill or upset (likewise: "I feel happy") The latter is, of course, the meaning most people try to convey. It's unclear whether this example shows the misuse of adjectives/adverbs or the fairly common use of "feel" as a copula verb (whose complement refers to its subject). That is, "feel" is often used with a meaning very close to "be." "I feel sick" is the equivalent of "I am sick" and using "I feel sickly" would be odd, for most native speakers. A better example might be something like: "I drive decent", with a meaning of "I drive decently" or "I drive well." As well, confusion often occurs between ''good'', ''well'' (adj.), and ''well'' (adv.). #"I feel good" - a good mood #"I feel well (adj.)" - good health (though this is often replaced by "I feel good" in everyday speech with little ambiguity in meaning) #"I did well (adv.)" - success There are other ways of changing words from one lexical class to another. Nouns are easily transformed into verbs by moving them to the appropriate position in a sentence, and then conjugating them according to the default paradigm. Nouns can also be changed to other kinds of nouns (<-er>, <-ist>), into adverbs of state/condition (<-ness>), and into adjectives (<-ish>, as in "bullish"). Verbs can be turned into adjectives with <-ing> ("dancing school"), into adverbs with <-ly>, and sometimes even into nouns with <-er> ("dancer", "listener"). These processes provide the English language with greater flexibility in choosing words, expanding vocabulary, and re-shuffling words to add subtlety of meaning that might otherwise not be available in an analytic language. OTHER TOPICS Slang The use of words like " Ain't " are accepted by some speakers but not by others. The difference is considered by descriptive grammarians to be a matter of Dialect or Register . Many constructions that are acceptable in, for example, African American Vernacular English might be considered ungrammatical in a context where formal Standard English was expected.Pinker, Steven. ''The Language Instinct,'' 1994. Chapter 12. SEE ALSO NOTES AND REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
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