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Showing posts from August, 2017

ADJECTIVE ORDER

Adjectives can be used to describe lots of things, from physical size, age, shape, colour, material, to more abstract things like opinion, origin and purpose. We can use adjectives together to give a detailed description of something. Adjectives that express opinions usually come before all others, but it can sometimes depend on what exactly you want to emphasise. For example:  "That's a nice, big, blue bag." (You like the bag.) "That's a nice blue." (You like the colour.) When we group adjectives together there is a general (sometimes flexible) rule for the position of each type of adjective, these are:- Position 1st* 2nd* 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th Opinion Size Age Shape Colour Material Origin Purpose Nice Small Old Square Black Plastic British Racing Ugly Big New Circular Blue Cotton American Running You might swap adjectives that express an opinion and an adjective based on fact depending on what you wish to emphasise:- For example: "She had a long, ug

ENGLISH ADJECTIVES

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When we compare things, people or even ideas we look at what makes them different from each other. Comparative adjectives are used to show what quality one thing has more or less than the other. They normally come before any other adjectives. !Tip  - It's a good idea to learn opposites (antonyms) when learning adjectives. For example: TALL / SHORT The man on the left is   taller  than the man on the right.   The man on the right is  shorter  than the man on the left. !Note  - Have you noticed that when we are comparing two things like this we put  than  between the adjective and the thing being compared. FAST / SLOW   A car is   faster  than   a bicycle.   A bicycle is  slower  than  a car. For example: BIG / SMALL   The red bag is   bigger than   the blue bag.   The blue bag is  smaller than  the red bag. For example:- 'good' becomes 'better' 'bad' becomes 'worse' 'far' becomes 'farther' or 'further'

CLAUSES

What is a clause? A clause is a part of a sentence. There are two main types: independent (main clauses), dependent (subordinate clauses). INDEPENDENT CLAUSES An independent clause is a complete sentence; it contains a subject and verb and expresses a complete thought in both context and meaning. For example: The door opened. Independent clauses can be joined by a coordinating conjunction to form complex or compound sentences. CO-ORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS and but for or nor so yet For example: Take two independent clauses and join them together with the conjunction  and : "  The door opened." "The man walked in." = The door opened  and  the man walked in. DEPENDENT CLAUSES A dependent (subordinate) clause is part of a sentence; it contains a subject and verb but does not express a complete thought. They can make sense on their own, but, they are dependent on the rest of the sentence for context and meaning. They are usually joined to an independent clause to form a co

PERSONAL PRONOUN/DETERMINER

Possessive Lynne's Lynne's My Mine Your Yours His His Her Hers Its Its Our Ours Their Theirs Whose Whose For example:- This is  Lynne's  web site. It's  my  website! It's  mine ! It's not  Zozanga's  web site. It's not  his  website! It's not  his ! Have you seen  her  book?   It's  her  book. It's  hers . Genitive Case You should still use the "of" form of the possessive / genitive case when talking about things that belong to other things. For example:- The door  of the  car.  You can also say, "the car door". The top speed  of the  car is 1000 km/hr.  You might also hear, "the car's top speed" in advertising, because they like to humanise things. The content  of the  website.  You can also say, "the website content", or "the website's content". Go to the top  of the  page. You may still hear someone say something like "The father  of the  bride," but it could equally be; &

POSSESSIVE CASE / GENITIVE CASE

T here are different ways to show ownership of something. To show possession you can use nouns to modify other nouns. (For purposes of clarity, we distinguish between the genitive case and the possessive case here.) The good news is that the genitive case "of" is used less and less in English today. Hooray! Possessive Case The possessive case is used to show ownership. The possessive pattern or mark ('s) is generally used when indicating a relation of ownership or association with a person, rather than a thing. (Linguistically speaking it is a form of genitive case.) Singular nouns take -'s. For example:- Bob's presentation. Lynne's web site kept growing larger and larger. There are, as ever, exceptions to this rule. When a group of people is involved or animals. For example:- The members' forum.  The dogs' tails. Companies are often treated like people. For example:- Coca Cola 's  latest advertising campaign. Irregular plural nouns that don't

Objective / Accusative Case

First you need to know what an object is. If the subject of a sentence is doing something to someone, that someone or something becomes the object of the sentence. Now it might help you if you know what the term "case" means. It's the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun, thankfully almost extinct in the English language, but we haven't buried it yet. A noun or pronoun is in the objective case when it is used as a direct object, an indirect object, or an object. A noun which is directly affected by the action of a verb is put into the objective case. In English we call this noun the "direct object" which is a little more descriptive of its function. It's the direct object of some action. Robert fixed  the car . In the example above, the "car" is in the objective case because it's the direct object of Robert's action of fixing. Pronouns are inflected to show the objective case . PERSONAL PRONOUN Objective/Accusative Referring to the

SUBJECTIVE / NOMINATIVE CASE

Used especially to identify the subject of a finite verb. A noun or pronoun is in the subjective when it is used as the subject of the sentence or as a predicate noun. In the following examples, nouns and pronouns in the subjective case are italicized. A noun in the subjective case is often the subject of a verb. For example: " The tree  fell on my car", "the tree" is in the nominative case because it's the subject of the verb "fell". Pronouns are inflected to show the subjective case PERSONAL PRONOUN Subjective/Nominative Referring to the subject in a sentence. I You He She It We They Who For example: Lynne  owns this web site. I  hope to finish my homework tomorrow. She  enjoyed her English lessons. He  is an  idiot . (The word idiot is a predicate noun because it follows  is;  a form of the verb "be") .

CASE

Case is the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun. There are only three cases in modern English, they are subjective  (he), objective  (him)  and possessive  (his) . They may seem more familiar in their old English form - nominative ,  accusative and genitive. There is no dative case in modern English. Yippee! First more good news. You cannot really go wrong here, we got rid of most of our cases and as a result English is easier than many other languages because nouns and some indefinite pronouns ( anyone, someone, everyone,  and so on) only have a distinctive case form for the possessive. There are a few remnants of old English though, and pronouns have distinctive forms in  all three cases  and should be used with a bit more care. The pronoun cases are simple though. There are only three:- 1.   Subjective case:  pronouns used as subject.   2.  Objective case:  pronouns used as objects of verbs or prepositions.  3.  Possessive case:  pronouns which express ownership. PERSONAL PRON