Written Exp_ 1st Yea ...

nouns are hard to define. You may have heard them described as ‘names’ (e.g.

Shân, Joanna, language, or cat), but they can also refer to abstract concepts such as

emptiness, joy, and age. However, many words more usually thought of as verbs, or

even as adverbs or adjectives, can be used as nouns, and it is its syntactic behaviour

which makes a word a noun rather than anything else. Nouns can usually be singular or

plural, they can be modified by adjectives and they can be preceded by determiners.

For example, in the sentence ‘Have you read a good book?’, a is a determiner, good is an

adjective, and book is a noun. Similarly, in the sentence ‘Did you have a good swim?’,

swim is a noun, although in a different sentence it could be used as a verb (‘I swim

every Monday’).

 refers to subject, verb, and object; the usual order, or arrangement, of grammatical

elements in English.

a class of word which is generally used to describe or modify a noun, such as cat; e.g. a sleepy small furry brown cat.

a class of word which is used to describe or modify a verb; for example, the verb purr can be modified by the adverb loudly: the cat purred loudly. Adverbs can also modify adjectives; the adverb absolutely can modify the adjective fabulous, in the phrase Absolutely Fabulous.

grammatical information contained in the verb phrase about the duration of an action; for example I was walking in contrast to I walked.

 a part of the verb phrase, separate from the lexical verb, which carries information about tense, mood and aspect. See page 67.

 a type of morpheme (such as -ed or -tion) which cannot stand on its own but must be attached to a free morpheme (such as pollute, to produce polluted, or pollution). See also derivational morpheme and inflectional morpheme.

a term which can be used generally to mean a group of similar things. See word class for a specific linguistic use of this term

a grammatical unit containing a main verb. A sentence has to contain at least one clause. There are various kinds of clauses. A main clause is one which contains a main

A clause is defined as an expression which contains (at least) a subject and a predicate, and which may contain other types of expression as well (e.g. one or more complements and/or adjuncts). In most cases, the predicate in a clause is a lexical main verb, so that there will be as many different clauses in a sentence as there are different lexical verbs.