You can see from these examples that the closed classes of words are more or less static; it is very difficult to create new determiners or substitutes for the, my and your. The open classes, however, are expanding all the time.
At this point a pause may be useful, because you are being confronted with grammatical terms which may mean little or nothing to you. But to make sense of grammar it is impossible to avoid familiarity with at least a handful of basic terms. These will, however, be kept to a workable and untaxing minimum.
Let’s begin with the ‘parts of speech’ – the components or building blocks of human communication. While you may not recognise the terms nor fully appreciate the roles they play, you are using them almost every minute of the day in your speech and writing. A simple analysis of a sentence might look like this:
If you’re ever in doubt about the grammatical status of any word, a good dictionary will tell you. Apart from defining a word’s meaning the entry will also identify its use as a noun (n), adjective (adj), adverb (adv) etc, and often give examples of usage.
What follows now is a brief outline of each of the nine classes into which all words are grouped according to their function. This is designed to help you find your feet on the nursery slopes of the grammatical piste. A more detailed discussion on each word class follows.
Nouns
A noun is a name – of a place, an object, a person, an animal, a concept, of anything:
| PLACES | street, home, Germany, Paris, heaven |
| OBJECTS | plate, chair, tree, chamber pot, air |
| PERSONS | Einstein, Michael Jackson, Caroline |
| ANIMALS | pony, pig, wolfhound, chimpanzee |
| CONCEPTS | option, bad temper, ability, direction |
We also recognise types of nouns. All nouns are either proper nouns – that is, names that are specific or unique:
Marilyn Monroe, Saturday, The Rake’s Progress, Mercedes, Brooklyn Bridge, Easter
or common nouns, which describe groups or members of groups, rather than individuals, or which broadly identify something:
boy, motor cars, tea, hair, darkness, opinions, anger, idea
You’ll notice that proper nouns start with capital letters, and that common nouns don’t. Common nouns are also divided into concrete and abstract nouns, count and non-count nouns, singular, plural and collective nouns, and these are all discussed in Naming Things: Nouns, on page 64.
Verbs
Verbs are all about doing and being. They’re action words. They’re the engines that drive sentences to make them do something. Imagine trying to get through a day without these workhorses:
wake, woke, eat, drink, walked, drove, go, talked, do, keep, appear, exist, become, sleeps, dream
You can see, even from these few examples, that verbs take several forms, some ending in -s, -ed, and so on, and in fact most verbs have four or more forms to help us grasp when an action is taking place:
eat, eats, eating, eaten, ate
write, writes, writing, wrote, written
If you look up the words eats, eating, eaten or ate in a dictionary you may have difficulty finding them. However you will find them in the entry following the basic verb eat, which is called the headword, along with derivatives such as eatable, eater, eating house, eatables, eat out, eat up, eat one’s heart out, etc.
Apart from their multiplicity of forms, verbs are notoriously variable: they can be regular (where they follow certain rules) and irregular (where they don’t); they can be main verbs or auxiliary verbs, transitive and intransitive, finite and infinite. But don’t let these grammatical gremlins scare you because they will be exposed for the poor, simple workaholics they are in the section on verbs on page 95.
Adjectives
Life without adjectives would be difficult, frustrating and extremely dull, because adjectives describe and modify things:
hot, freezing, beautiful, hairy, user-friendly, brainless, distasteful, pathogenic, pliable
Some adjectives give themselves away by their endings: -ing, -y, -less, -ful, -ic and so on. They can also end with -ly which can cause us to confuse them with adverbs, which often end with the same suffix.
Simply put, adjectives add something to nouns and pronouns by modifying –
It was a dreary match.
We made a late start.
or by extending or reinforcing a noun’s descriptive power –
It was an obvious mistake.
The lady possessed hypnotic charm.
You’ll see that all the adjectives in the examples so far have come before the noun, but this need not always be the case:
The lady’s charm was hypnotic.
There is a fuller discussion of adjectives and how to use them on page 120.
Adverbs
Because they add information, adverbs are close relations to adjectives, as you can see:
| Adjectives | Adverbs |
| essential | essentially |
| hypnotic | hypnotically |
| interesting | interestingly |
| dark | darkly |
Don’t be tricked, however, by believing that all adverbs end in -ly. They’re very common, but the adverb family includes several other forms: afterwards, enough, always, nevertheless, otherwise.
The difference between adjectives and adverbs is that adjectives modify nouns and pronouns, while adverbs describe or modify verbs, adjectives and even other adverbs:
| MODIFYING A VERB | He trudged wearily along the road.(How did he walk along the road?) |
| MODIFYING AN ADJECTIVE | She’s an exceedingly lucky girl.(To what extent is she lucky?) |
| MODIFYING ANOTHER ADVERB | The engine turned over very smoothly. |
| (How smoothly did it turn over?) |
Adverbs are often required where adjectives are incorrectly used, and vice versa. A guide to their usage will be found on page 120.
Pronouns
Pronouns are stand-ins for nouns and noun phrases, and are especially useful for avoiding repetition:
| WITHOUT A PRONOUN | He saw James in the bar, and went over to meet James. |
| Was I aware that Marcia was
|