Grammar Flashcards
List the 10 grammar points
Common nouns
Proper nouns
Pronouns
Adjectives
Determiners
Prepositions
Verbs
Auxiliaries
Adverbs
Conjunctions
(Common) Nouns
E.x. Family, socks, sheep, paper, window
Identify things, people, places, concepts
Not capitalized
Most can be made plural by adding -s or -es
Most are preceded by a determiner
Many refer to things that can be counted
(Proper) Nouns
Capitalized names of particular things and people:
Places (Moncton)
Companies (Microsoft)
Organizations (the United Nations)
Titles (Professor X, Doctor Y)
Religions (Christianity)
Languages (Hebrew)
Nationalities (Canadian)
Ethnicities (Armenian)
Months (September)
Days (Tuesday)
Pronouns
They replace nouns and noun phrases
Personal subject: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me
Personal object: me, you, him, her, it, us, them
Possessive: mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs
Demonstrative: this, that, these, those
Adjectives
They are descriptors which modify nouns:
Beauty: lovely, ugly
Rank: first, last
Age: old, young
Shape: round, crooked
Size: enormous, tiny
Colour: navy
Quality: good, awful
Sensory: bitter, fresh
Quantity: abundant, numerous
Common adjective endings (including comparative and superlative form endings)
-able
-al
-ful
-ic
-I’ve
-ish
-less
-ous
…
-er
-est
More + adj
Less + adj
Most adj
Least adj
Determiners
Including articles, introduce nouns
They include:
Articles (the, a, an)
Cardinal and ordinal numbers (two, four, third, seventieth)
Demonstratives (these, those, this, that)
Possessives (my, your, his, her)
Quantifiers (few, many, some, more, each, every, all, most, a lot of)
Interrogatives (what, which, whose)
Prepositions
Introduce noun phrases in a prepositional phrase
They work with nouns or pronouns to indicate location in a prepositional phrase.
preposition + NP = PP (in Paris)… (without me)… (under a harvest moon)
Verbs
Indicate actions, occurrences and states of being
Can be marked to indicate past time (+ -ed or in a vowel change: bite/bit, spit/spat or as an irregular: go/went)
Auxiliaries
Verbs supporting the main verb
To be, to have, to do
E.x. He is running, he will run, he does not run quickly, he has already run.
Adverb
Modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs
Give information about time, manner, place, cause or degree.
They help answer the following questions about a sentence: how, when, where, or to what extent.
E.x. Quickly, quietly, nearly, sometimes, rarely, never, unfortunately, completely, consequently, thus, however, finally
Note the common -ly ending: gracefully, busily, carefully
Adverbs without suffixes: then, here, well, rather, indeed
What are the two types of conjunctions (joining words)?
Coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions
Coordinating conjunctions
They join two words or word groups of the same kind and of equal importance
E.x. And, or, not, but, for, so, yet
E.x. Do you want pie or ice cream for dessert?
Subordinating conjunctions
Join a dependent, less important clause to the main clause.
E.x. After, although, as, because, before, if, since, once, than, that, though, until
What are the 6 distributional properties?
Nouns occur with determiners (a table)
A noun can be replaced by a pronoun
Verbes occur with auxiliaries (has gone)
Verbs occur with subjects and have tense
Adjectives occur with degree words (very, too)
Adjectives occur between a determiner and a noun
