Grammar Secrets

Caroline Taggart

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780007591305
• eBook ISBN: 9780007591312
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Gramática y puntuación

Let’s admit it, we all struggle with Grammar. There, they’re or their? Who’s or whose? Me or I? Fewer or less? Inside this little book one of Britain’s top Grammar Gurus reveals all you need to know about Grammar but were afraid to ask.

Grammar
Secrets

To begin at the beginning …

Let’s start with the way words work: the various tasks they perform that allow us to put a sentence together.

The car rolled relentlessly down the long drive and it crashed into the newly pruned hedge. Help!

Those two lines contain examples of all the different parts of speech – that is, the categories into which words are divided according to their function in a sentence. If you include the interjections and the articles or determiners (which not all experts do), there are nine of them. We’ll go into more detail later, but these are the basics of what they do:

Noun

A naming word; one that gives a name to a person, thing or concept. Name, person, thing and concept are all nouns. As, in our sample sentence, are car, drive and hedge.

Pronoun

A word, often a very short one, that stands in place of a noun, so that you don’t have to repeat the noun over and over again. In the example above, it refers back to the car.

Verb

The action or doing word: it tells you what is happening in the sentence, and because a verb may be in the present, past or future tense (or variations on that theme) it also tells you when it happened. Rolled and crashed are both verbs in the past tense.

Adjective

Adjectives modify or qualify nouns or pronouns, telling us something specific about the person, thing or concept that they denote. In this example, long gives us information about the drive and pruned describes the hedge.

Adverb

Like adjectives, adverbs are modifiers, but their role is to modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. How did the car roll? It rolled relentlessly. What sort of pruned hedge is it? A newly pruned hedge. Adverbs are often (but by no means invariably) formed by adding -ly to an adjective.

Preposition

As the name suggests, a preposition shows where one thing is in relation to another. In, on, up, under, over, between, in front of, behind and, in our example, down and into, are all prepositions.

Conjunction

A conjunction joins two parts of a sentence. The most common conjunction, as in our example, is and, which joins two equally important parts of a sentence. But, for, or, yet and so work in the same way; other conjunctions such as because, although or as soon as link the main part of a sentence with a subordinate clause.

Interjection

An interjection or exclamation (as in Help!) is used to show a feeling or reaction – Good grief! Oh no! Rubbish! It is not linked grammatically to the rest of the sentence – in our example it forms not a sentence but what is known as a sentence fragment. It is often followed by an exclamation mark.

Determiner

The most common determiners are the indefinite articles (a and an) and the definite article (the). Others include:

• this and that (as in this year or that address) and their plurals these and those (these leopards, those tigers)
• the group of words known as quantifiers – some, none, any, both, few etc
• the possessive adjectives, my, your, his, her, its, our, their

The point of a determiner is that it determines or limits the meaning of a noun. In the sentence A cat may look at a king, for example, the indefinite articles show that we mean any old cat and any old king, whereas in My cat may look at the king, the identity of both cat and king is pinned down by the determiners.

Multi-tasking

Many, many words in English can function as different parts of speech depending on how they are used in a sentence:

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel (noun).

I need a torch to light my way home (verb).

There was a light shower of rain this afternoon (adjective).

She was wearing a light yellow dress (adverb).

Or:

I always walk slowly and find myself at the rear of the group (noun).

When a grizzly bear rears up on its hind legs, it looks enormous (verb).

The rear entrance leads into the kitchen (adjective).

This is nothing to worry about – you’re already using these words correctly. Just remember that it is the word’s function in a sentence, not the word itself, that defines what part of speech it is.

Is it a noun? Is it a verb?

A handful of words are pronounced the same but spelled differently depending on whether they are nouns or verbs. Licence and license, practice and practise are the most common.

The rule here is that – in British English – the noun has a c and the verb an s. The way to remember this is to be aware that there are other pairs of words that are pronounced differently as well as being spelled differently: if you know that advise is a verb and advice is a noun (I advise you to take my advice), you can apply the same rule to licence and practice:

Even James Bond needed a licence before he was licensed to kill.

It is good practice to practise the piano before giving a recital.

Two other familiar pairings in this group are prophecy (noun – last syllable pronounced see) and prophesy (verb – last syllable pronounced sigh), and device (noun – last syllable pronounced ice) and devise (verb – last syllable pronounced ize):

He prophesied that his prophecy would come true.

He devised an intricate device for breaking into the safe.

Vowels and consonants

Here’s another basic: the way we divide up the alphabet. Some letters are vowels; others are consonants. They are distinguished by the way our vocal tract works when we pronounce them (it really doesn’t matter for our purposes but, for the record, vowels are produced by a fairly open tract, with vibration of the vocal cords, while with a consonant the breath is at least partly obstructed).

In English it’s traditional to say that the vowels are a, e, i, o and u, and that all the rest are consonants. This is an over-simplification, however, particularly when it comes to y. In symbol or hymn, to name but two, y is clearly serving the function of a vowel: replace it with i in either of these words and the pronunciation would be the same. On the other hand, in yellow and buoyant it’s a consonant.

We also have things that the experts call semivowels, such the w in law and cow, but that’s getting a bit technical: what matters here is that when we say ‘a vowel followed by a consonant’, we know what it means.

Less or fewer?

Our first part of speech, nouns, can be divided into a number of categories that we’ll look at over the next few pages. And yes, you’re right, less and fewer are not nouns, they’re determiners, but they’ve sneaked in here because they are associated with countable and non-countable nouns.

The supermarket cliché five items or less was coined by someone who didn’t know about this distinction. That probably applies to most of us, but it really isn’t rocket science.

A countable noun is used for things you can count: one potato, two hats, eleven players in a football team. The number doesn’t have to be specified – you could have some potatoes, a few hats, several players – but these phrases are all a reasonable answer to the question ‘How many?’

A non-countable or mass noun denotes something you can’t count, but you can have some of, more of: some sugar, more water. It can also be something abstract: some beauty, more gentleness. The question being answered here is ‘How much?’

With some nouns there is overlap: in a café we could order two coffees (countable, because you me...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• About the author
• Grammar Secrets
• Some further reading
• About the Publisher