Subject-aux inversion can work with any auxiliary, including modals, Aux have, Aux do, and Aux be.

The last, and simplest, form of movement is called fronting. In general, adjuncts in the VP can be fronted, or moved to the beginning of the sentence before the subject.

A relative clause is a specific kind of subordinate clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase. However, there are two types of relative clauses: restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses.

The clause is the largest unit of English syntax, and is a type of category, like phrases and parts of speech.

Adjective phrases can also occur as dependents of the verb phrase; in this case they are almost invariably the type of complement called a predicative complement. These occur with linking and complex verbs, like ‘be’, ‘seem’, and ‘consider’:

Prepositional phrases are often optional modifiers in the sentence rather than the central elements. Nonetheless, prepositional phrases appear over and over, and so it’s worth examining how these phrases work in some detail.

because phrases often contain only one word, there is no good reason to assume that the genitive behaves differently with individual nouns than it does with multi-word phrases.

We will call this function the determinative.[1] In its most basic semantic role, a determinative indicates the definiteness of a noun phrase. That is, it tells us whether the NP has a specific referent or not.

Subjects are also unusual in that they are not part of the verb phrase; they are known as external complements.

Many grammar books treat linking verbs as a separate category, neither transitive nor intransitive, but we are considering transitivity to be a binary quality. Any verb can be categorized as transitive or intransitive, but there is more to verb-phrase structure than just transitivity.

One important point to note about subjects is that they frequently consist of more than one word.

When we analyze a sentence, we take it apart to determine what function each unit in the sentence has. This process is known as parsing a sentence.

Taken together, all these observations lead to a surprising conclusion: English does not have a future tense. English tenses are expressed by inflections on the verb. That means that English has only two tenses: present and past. Will is an auxiliary and part of a different verbal system, that of mood. Will does have a tense, but as examples 10a-d show, it is a present-tense verb.

First, remember that tense is not the same as time. To say that English lacks a future tense does not mean that it has no way of referring to the future. It has many ways to do that. In English, the future is a time-reference, but not a tense.

Adjective (Adj) – Adjectives describe (or more precisely, modify) nouns. Adjectives usually appear in the noun phrase before a noun and after any determiners. (the hungry dog, five tired students) but can also appear in the predicate after a linking verb (the dog is hungry, five students seem tired.) Adjectives often have comparative and superlative forms (better, best, colder, coldest). Adjectives do not describe anything that isn’t a noun—if a word is describing a verb, another adjective, or an adverb, it’s an adverb instead. Examples of adjectives: cool, fun, angry, uglier, nicest, complicated, sensible, first, unbelievable, ridiculous, running (in it’s a running gag) Adverb (Adv) – Adverbs are parallel to adjectives, but they modify (and describe) things that aren’t nouns, from verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs, all the way up to entire sentences. Adverbs are kind of the ‘catch-all’ of the parts of speech, and it’s pretty much impossible to give a concise and complete definition of what an adverb is, because different adverbs have different properties. Some are made from adjectives + ly but not all -ly endings are adverbs (lovely and ugly are adjectives, not adverbs). Adverbs generally answer some questions about the things they modify, like ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘to what extent.’ Adverbs are the only things that can go between auxiliary and main verbs, and if something can move around a lot in the sentence without changing the meaning (especially to the front and back of the sentence) then it’s probably an adverb. Examples of adverbs: yesterday (in we went to the store yesterday) very (in very good) often (in we go to school often), not (in I’m not sorry), just, quickly, and many more.

Determiner (D) – Also known as determinative. Goes with a noun and specifies something about that noun (but doesn’t quite describe it the way an adjective does.) Articles are one type of determiners (a, the, an) but demonstratives (this cat, these shoes) that go with nouns, possessive ‘pronouns’ like my, your, her (with nouns), possessive nouns like ‘Mike’s’, quantifiers with nouns (many, most, some), numerals with nouns (one cat, seventeen cats, zero cats) and the question word which with a noun are all also determiners. Determiners are always part of noun phrases and come before any adjectives describing the head noun. Examples of determiners: a, the, seventeen, my, her, many, all, most, no (in we have no bananas), John’s

Let’s take a deeper look at writing and speech. What are some of the distinctions between them? Writing is edited; we can more easily delete or rewrite something over again to make sure how we want to come across is shown in our writing. We can prewrite and brainstorm, which is an effective way of writing (Sadiku 31). This is something we cannot do as we speak.

In language, some words are made up of one indivisible part, but many other words are made up of more than one component, and these components (whether a word has one or more) are called morphemes. A morpheme is a minimal unit of lexical meaning (Hamawand 3). So, while some words can consist of one morpheme and thus be minimal units of meaning in and of themselves, many words consist of more than one morpheme. For example, the word peace has one morpheme and cannot be broken down into smaller units of meaning. Peaceful has two morphemes, peace the state of harmony that exists during the absence of war, plus -ful, a suffix, meaning full of something. Peacefully has three morphemes: peace + –ful + –ly, with the final morpheme –ly indicating ‘in the manner of’. So really, peacefully contains three units of meaning that, when combined, give us the meaning of the word as a whole. Words can have a lot more than three morphemes, however (Kurdi 90).

The basic attitude towards language that this course promotes is that language is a phenomenon to be studied, not an ideal or goal to be reached.

Linguistics takes a descriptive approach to language: it tries to explain things as they actually are, not as we wish them to be. When we study language descriptively, we try to find the unconscious rules that people follow when they say things like sentence (1). On the other hand, the schoolbook approach to language is typically prescriptive. It tries to tell you how you should speak and write.