Linguistics
One Must Wash Their Hands: Using “They” in the Singular and ImpersonalMost native English speakers can recall (with some trepidation) the days of fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises. Consider with me the following sentences:...
September 29, 2011- To Boldly Go Where Most English Speakers Have Gone Before: The Split Infinitive
To split the infinitive or to not split the infinitive, that is the question. Prescriptive grammars forbid the splitting of infinitives....
September 28, 2011 - With or Without a Complement: Ending Sentences with Prepositions
What is up with the English grammar rule “do not end sentences with prepositions”? I clearly remember my grade school grammar...
September 27, 2011 - Using Nouns and Noun Phrases as Indirect Objects
Nouns are traditionally defined as words that refer to a person, place, thing, or idea. A noun phrase is a phrase...
September 26, 2011 - Using Nouns and Noun Phrases as Direct Objects
Nouns have traditionally been defined as words for people, places, things, and ideas. A noun phrase consists of a noun plus...
September 25, 2011 - English Punctuation
Discover the rules for using apostrophes, braces, brackets, colons, commas, dashes, ellipses, hyphens, italics, parentheses, periods, question marks, exclamation marks, interrobangs,...
September 24, 2011 - Using Nouns and Noun Phrases as Subject Complements
In traditional grammar books, nouns have been defined as describing people, places, things, and ideas. Noun phrases consist of a noun...
September 23, 2011 - Using Nouns and Noun Phrases as Subjects
A noun is traditionally defined as a word that denotes a person, place, thing, or idea. A noun phrase is a...
September 22, 2011 - Evidence for the Death of the English Case System
Of the following eight sentences, which contain grammatically possible uses of English pronouns? My husband and I went to the movies....
September 21, 2011 - The English Personal Pronoun System
Pronouns are small words that can take the place of nouns and noun phrases. Personal pronouns are pronouns that take the...
September 20, 2011 - Grammatical Tense
Grammatical tense is the grammaticalized expression of the location in time of an action or state. Tense only roughly corresponds to...
September 19, 2011 - English Adjectives
Notional grammars define adjectives as “words that describe nouns.” An adjective phrase consists of an adjective plus any modifiers and complements....
September 18, 2011 - English Nouns
Notional grammars define nouns as “words that name people, places, things, and ideas.” Noun phrases are phrases that consist of a...
September 17, 2011 - The English Speaker That Used the ‘Wrong’ Relative Pronoun: Subordinating with Who and That
According to the prescriptive grammar rule, the relative pronoun who should be used for people, and the relative pronoun that should...
September 16, 2011 - The Form-Function Method: Teaching Grammar with Grammatical Form and Grammatical Function
Grammar is an area of the language arts that teachers often find difficult to teach and students likewise find difficult to...
September 15, 2011
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