#english

This blog is intended to do two things. First, it will elucidate the difference between English clauses and phrases; and give a very general overview of the types. Second, it will be a hub for links to all of the different phrase and clause blogs I write. On publication of this blog, I don't have too many of those blog

In a previous blog we learned about verbs. Verbs are "doing words" - they describe actions, events or states of being. Verbs are generally considered to be the most important part of a sentence. It's easy to think about verbs in simple sentences, like:However, due to English having a limited number of tenses,

A pronoun is a word used to take the place of a noun or another pronoun e.g. I, you, him, this, who. The noun or pronoun for which a pronoun stands is called the antecedent (from antecēdere, to go before). In the sentence "John goes to school but he does not study" the noun John is the antecedent of he.Most

It is often said that the verb, the "doing word", is the most important part of the sentence. Verbs communicate actions, events or states of being. One piece of information we want communicate with verbs is when the action, event or state of being happened with respect to when the statement is being spoken. W

English relies on word order to communicate meaning. This presents us with a big problem though - how can we express meanings which other languages place into extensive case and inflection systems? English cleverly solves this by use of the operator and in some cases even introducing a dummy operator. An operator is an

In linguistics, we love to classify and sort. A favourite kind of classification is the "parts of speech". In this classification, we are trying to sort each word into a group to better understand speech.However, we instantaneously hit a little hitch here: what is a word? Unfortunately for us, that's one of t

Perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of English grammar is the use of the word whom. Many people (including me) will correct the use of who to whom where appropriate; but many people (excluding me) can actually explain when whom is correct. In this blog, I shall totally demystify whom forever. Not only that, but w

You may know English as a SVO language; subject, verb, object. While SVO certainly does characterise the language; the situation is much more complex than that. In fact, there are seven basic sentence structures, listed here:We also use the following acronyms within this blogWe will dig into the definitions of each of