Grammar Flashcards
Word classification
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles
Nouns
common
abstract
proper
collective
Verbs
transitive
intransitive
active
passive
regular
irregular
Adjectives
demonstrative - these books
possessive - My books
proper - John’s books
quantitative - many books
interrogative - whose books
numerical - ten books
qualitative - brilliant books
(can be pre or post modifying)
Conjugation
the process of changing verbs’ fork to suit different tenses
Adverbs
manner - walk dangerously
place - come here
time - i’ll win soon
degree - i hate you completely
frequency - i often dance
Pronouns
personal - he, she, they
pluralised - they, them, those
demonstrative - these, that, those
possessive - mine, yours, theirs
nominative
oblique
interrogative
Prepositions
Physical proximity and relationships
in, on, under, near
Conjunctions
connective words that coordinate - independent clauses or subordinate
Articles
indefinite and definite
Minor sentences
sentences that don’t contain all the elements of a clause.
Simple sentences
sentences that contain one independent main clause
Compound sentences
sentences that contain two main clauses joined by coordinating conjunction or semi-colon.
Complex sentences
sentences that contain two or more clauses: a main and a subordinating clause (or two), not necessarily in this order.
Morpheme
the smallest grammatical units that have some intrinsic meaning or value. ‘Dog’ is a morpheme. It cannot be broken into smaller units of meaning. ‘S’ can be a morpheme if meaning pluralisation through its morphology with other morphemes. Consequently ‘Dogs’ is a word constructed from two morphemes.
Free morpheme
a morpheme that can stand on its own as a word.
Bound morpheme
a morpheme that cannot stand on its own as a word, but which must be prefixed or suffixed to a free morpheme: antithesis and smelly respectively.
Phrase:
a group of words centred around the role of a word classification, or a ‘head word’, e.g. noun phrase, adjective phrase, prepositional phrase.
Clause:
a group of words centred around a verb, containing the elements, subject (a noun or pronoun), a verb, and optionally an object (another noun or pronoun). Can be grammatically complete (main clause) or incomplete (subordinate clause).
Coordination
joining two or more independent clauses via co-ordinating conjunctions to make compound sentences.
Subordination
the joining of two or more clauses where only one is independent (the main clause) and the others are dependent (subordinating clause/clauses) - sometimes with a subordinating conjunction.
Active voice
a clause where the subject of a sentence carries out the verb - Mike hit Jonny.
Passive voice
a clause where the subject of a sentence has a verb done to it - Jonny was hit by Mike.
Tense
how the time of an event is marked (usually by verb inflection): past, present (and arguably) future.
Aspect
another element of marking the time of an event, by specifying whether they are progressive (ongoing) or perfective (completed). E.g the past progressive tense: I was going; the past perfect tense: I had been.
Sentence function
the overarching purpose of a sentence, which can be declarative (a statement), imperative (a command), interrogative (a question), exclamative (emotional) or subjunctive (conditional or expressing hypotheticals).
Syntactic dislocation
using a noun and pronoun as one subject in a sentence or clause, e.g. ‘I’m brilliant at football, me.’; ‘Jenny… she’s not feeling too well.’
Clitic morphemes
: morphemes that have a part of them elided, in writing expressed with an apostrophe, e.g. proclitic morphemes like t’was, and enclitic morphemes like didn’t, shouldn’t
Periphrastic grammar
grammatically unnecessary wording in structures, e.g. he did go to the hospital, as opposed to he went to the hospital. Note, in this example, there may be prosodic stress on ‘did’ in the first example to indicate perlocutionary emphasis and the grammar would not be periphrastic.
Superlatives
adjectives, normally with -est suffixes, that mark the most extreme semantic value.
Comparatives
adjectives, normally with -er suffixes, that mark a relative value.
Parenthesis
segregating extra information between a pair of commas, brackets or dashes, each of which adds extra information in subtly different ways.
Grammatical apposition
layering of extra information through the doubling up of nouns, quite typically found in newspapers: Donna Bridgemoor, the accused, a barmaid at the Royal Oak, last night…
Syndetic listing
Lists of items that somewhere include a coordinating conjunction
Asyndetic listing
Lists of items that have no coordinating conjunction at all.
